Woody Frossard
(November 1979 – present)
After graduating college from Colorado State University in 1976, Gus W. Frossard turned down two job offers to move back to home-sweet-home, Texas. He had thoughts of maybe settling in as a wildlife biologist working for the state or something similar. After a couple of jobs with the City of Houston and Trinity River Authority of Texas, Woody landed at the water district in late 1979 as Manager of Technical Support Services. From there he spent some time as Acting Manager of Real Estate and Oil and Gas Property Manager. He spent most of his time acquiring property, plugging oil and gas wells, and getting the permitting necessary to build Richland-Chambers Reservoir. In August 1987, he became the district’s first Environmental Services Division Director. And today his fingerprints are all over the environmental and stewardship programs initiated at the District. Along the way, Woody was also given the responsibility of overseeing the Central City Flood Control Project. He tried to retire in June 2023, but he still offers his permitting expertise on district projects. And boy, does he have some stories to tell…
Oral History Interview
Interviewee: Woody Frossard
Interviewer: Mark Olson
September 11, 2024
Mark O: Hello. Welcome to another edition of Beneath the Surface, an oral history project of the Tarrant Regional Water District. We’re using this project to spend time with long term employees to capture their thoughts, experiences, and insight covering their careers here at the water district.
My name is Mark Olson, senior video producer here at TRWD. Today is Tuesday, September 17th, 2024.
Sitting across from me is Woody Frossard , a man who has one way or another been involved in environmental planning and management of the district projects since 1979.
In the lead up to the construction of Richland Chambers Reservoir, Woody’s role morphed from serving as Manager of Technical Support Services, Acting Manager of the Real Estate Division, and Oil and Gas Property Manager.
In 1987, Woody took on the role of Director of Environmental Services, a position that covers:
water quality modeling,
water rights permitting,
waste control,
overall watershed management,
oil and gas pollution,
and emergency response.
And as if that wasn’t enough, in 2007, Woody’s Journey took on a parallel role of Program Director for Trinity River Vision, where he provided guidance, leadership, and technical direction in the execution of project components.
The primary goal of that position was to establish the environmental permitting and implementation of the Panther Island Central City Flood Control Project. A massive undertaking that involved extensive environmental cleanup on Panther Island and the redesign of flood control operations in the Trinity Floodway – which will include the construction of a 1.5-mile bypass channel on the West and Clear forks of the Trinity River north of downtown Fort Worth.
Woody tried to retire in June of 2023. But he remains a staff advisor for the Central City Flood Control Program. And he still adds his expertise to permitting issues at the water district.
And with that, it’s good to see him make an appearance here every now and then. Welcome, Woody.
Woody F: Thank you. Mark. Appreciate it.
Mark O: All right. So let’s get started by talking a little bit about… I saw that you grew up in East Texas.
Woody F: Yeah, I grew up in Madisonville, which is kind of East Texas, and graduated from high school from there. And then went to college, ended up graduating from college at Colorado State University with a degree in environmental management or natural resources management.
Mark O: Okay. And so with that degree you headed back to Texas. What did you end up doing?
Woody F: When I graduated, I was so homesick for Texas that I ended up having two job opportunities and I turned them both down to come home. And I didn’t have a clue if I was going to get a job or not. But I had to come back to Texas.
Once I got here, I ended up going to work for the city of Houston in the Air Control Board, and I flew in a helicopter every day looking for pollution coming from on-ground sources.
I stayed there for about two years, and then I left and went to the Trinity River Authority, and I worked out of the Arlington office as their Basin Wildlife Biologist. And I worked everywhere from up in Archer County to out in the Gulf of Mexico.
Mark O: Oh, wow. That’s cool. And then so you spent a little time in Houston, I don’t believe too long, and a little time at Trinity River Authority. How did you end up getting roped in to working for the Tarrant Regional Water District?
Woody F: The group that I was with at TRA was in the process of helping the water district do the environmental work for the environmental permit needed with the Corps of Engineers to build Richland Chambers.
It was called an environmental information document. And I ended up writing quite a few chapters of that report. And was the person who was responsible for providing it to the Tarrant County Water Control Improvement District Number One, which is what we were back at that time. And through that negotiation, they ended up… TRA wanted to represent
the water district in the permitting process with the Corps for the reservoir.
Woody F: But during that conversation over a period of time, they asked if I would come over to the water district and manage the permit, because they wanted to manage the reservoir permitting themselves. Not having a third party do it. So, I ended up coming here as, getting the 404 permit from the Corps for Richland-Chambers Reservoir.
Mark O: And so… who was the one that specifically hired you to do that?
Woody F: The general manager at that time was Mr. Ben Hickey. And Mr. Hickey was the one who actually ended up offering me the job and hiring me.
Mark O: Okay, great. That’s that’s a long time ago.
Woody F: A very long time ago.
Mark O: And then, so as you come on board, what did you specifically start doing for the water district?
Woody F: So initially, I knew we had to do a lot of environmental studies. And so I was in the process of, of going out for request for proposals for doing both environmental analysis to identify, in my world, what’s called habitat units, because that’s what you have to mitigate whenever you destroy a habitat. You need to make up the same amount of habitat units. And I was doing work for archeological studies at Richland, both.
And so that kept me busy for a few months. But once I got the proposals in, I provided them to Mr. Hickey. He was good with the environmental component. But when he saw the archeological component that study (this would have been back in like ‘80 or ’81) was over $1 million just for the archeology.
He felt that I may have overstepped my bounds in coming up with a contract proposal of a million. So, he sent me to work for the Land Department. Head of the Land Department at that time was a lady by the name of Jane Patty.
And he – he being Mr. Hickey – wanted to talk to some other people about… did we really need to do the work that I was proposing?
So while that was going on, Jane put me to work drafting documents for acquisition of property at Richland Chambers. So you can go back to our old files. And back in those days, you used a USGS quad sheet. You took a deed, you read the deed, and you plotted that deed property on the USGS quad sheet.
So, I spent about six months as a draftsperson in the Land Department, plotting out property that we needed to buy from old deed records, which is very interesting but I did not want to do that for the rest of my career.
After about six months, Mr. Hickey was convinced that the environmental recommendations that I’d made for the work had to be done. So, he brought me back, put me back as head of the Head of Permitting for the district, and had me start moving forward with both the environmental work and the archeological work for Richland-Chambers.
Mark O: And then so what did that archeological work cover? What were you guys trying to preserve or trying to document at that time?
Woody F: Well, we ended up having to put together a committee that consisted of both the State Historical Commission, the Corps of Engineers Archeology Section, and the National Historic Preservation Office out of Washington, D.C.
And ultimately, the decision was made – we needed to go in and look for both historic and prehistoric evidence. And to document everything we could. But, depending on the volume of material we found, there was a decision made early on in the process that we were not going to remove burials anymore.
We had we had found enough burials and documented the age of the burials. This is all the prehistoric, not historic, but they documented where they were archaic or what level of age they were. We found one village in the whole area, which is a pretty major thing at that time. And then the decision was made, don’t remove any more burials. Document them, but just leave them in place.
On the historic side, we ended up finding 3 or 4 historic graveyards. One was known, the other ones weren’t. And so we then had to go through the process of disinterring the graves and finding a place that we could move them to that would accept them. Then reinter them back in with new caskets, name tags, if we knew who they were. If we didn’t, it had a name tag of an unknown person.
We ran into one difficulty specifically. And this was after the reservoir was built. There was a fisherman sitting on the big Island out in the middle of Richard-Chambers Reservoir. He had gone in to eat lunch. And he was sitting there and I think he had a dog with him. I’m not sure exactly. But he ended up finding a skull sitting on the surface of the washed out area because the lake was low.
He called the sheriff’s department. The sheriff’s department came out. They marked it off as a crime scene. Sent the bones to SMU for identification.
Woody F: And, it turned out that they were nothing recent, but they turned out to be around the, oh, if I remember right, 1910, 1920s. Therefore, they called the water district. And the water district obviously called me and said, ‘that’s your job. You go deal with it.’
We ended up, having a burial at the edge of the reservoir on that island. The issue became we wanted to just follow the law. And you have two different laws that cover it. One is the Antiquities Code that covers it. And then you also have another on the state called the Health and Safety Code.
The Health and Safety Code has, when you disinter a body, you have to have it back in the ground in 24-hours. Antiquities Code requires you to do enough review or… what’s my word…
Mark O: Analysis?
Woody F: Yeah. That’s good. Do enough analysis on the remains to make a determination – were they prehistoric? Were they historic? If they were historic, what their age was. Can you get any idea why they died? You know, was there an epidemic? Or what was the issue?
So, we ended up having… I really don’t remember now… how many bodies we had. Something like 20 in that graveyard that we had to move. And so we just wanted to pick them up. Take them where they needed to go. And reinter them.
And there was a group within the local area that wanted the burials to go to a specific cemetery, which we were fine with. The only problem is the Health and Safety Code requires you when you when you reinter a body, it has to go to a perpetual care cemetery. It wasn’t a perpetual care cemetery. So, the district judge would not let us reinter them.
So, all of the bodies, we had to put them in new caskets. They then went to the evidence room in the Navarro County Sheriff’s Office and stayed there for like 8 or 9 months before we could get that issue resolved. So, we had burials in the sheriff’s office. They weren’t too happy with us. We set up a laboratory on site. And we would, on the, not the island, but on the dry ground.
The archeologists, once they disinterred a body, would take it by boat to their lab. Do their work. And then we would have to carry them to the sheriff’s office.
So, it took about a year to get that one little project done, due to the fact there were dueling laws associated with either get them reinterred in 12 or 24 hours. Or you got to study them enough to know what the issue, you know why they were there, if you can.
That was a somewhat of an interesting thing that occurred while I was here.
Mark O: Yeah, I would say so. That’s not exactly what you think about when you’re talking about the construction of a reservoir and, you know, filling it up for water supply. So, by that time I’m thinking you’re at the Oil and Gas Property Manager phase to a certain extent.
Woody F: Yeah. At that point in time, the reservoir had already been built because wave action had eroded and caused the cemetery to be exposed. I was the oil and gas Head of Oil and Gas…
Once I got the permit for the reservoir, my next job was the Acting Real Estate Manager. And it was specifically for getting the property bought needed for building the reservoir. And the one good outcome was we had about 3 or 4 different land agents down at Corsicana at that time. Going out and buying property or meeting with the public and trying to buy property.
I got assigned one person who lived way off in the bottom of Richland Creek his name. Maybe I shouldn’t say that name, but you can get rid of it. But it was Ed Qualls and Ed lived in a little wooden house and he lived with his sister Nora.
And I would go there and he would open the door, come out to see me, and leave the door open, cracked. And after, I don’t know, 5 or 6 meetings, I got to be friends with him, and he invited me into the house. And when I got to the house, Nora was there at 30-30. So, every time I showed up, there was a 30- 30 on me while, during the crack in that door.
So, he never threatened me. It was just kind of weird to know that that had happened, you know? But, so Head of Real Estate I had those issues.
And after that, the water district knew that there were a lot of oil and gas wells that was going to be in the bottom of the lake. And so Mr. Hickey called me in one day and said… he call me either Gus, Woodrow or Gustavus, depending on what his attitude was that day. So, I knew kind of what was going to happen at the meeting, depending on what he call me. If he was mad, iIt was Gustavus.
But anyway, he called me in and said, ‘Woody, we’ve got a lot of oil and gas wells in Richland. We have nobody here at the district who knows anything about oil and gas. You’re our Environmental Director. Oil and gas will cause pollution in the lake. Therefore, I’m making you in charge of it.’ That’s how I got to be the head of the oil and gas component at Richland.
Over the period of about probably four years, maybe five, we ended up finding and plugging over 700 wells in the bottom of the reservoir.
The problem that, the biggest problem we had was the Corsicana field was the first field discovered west of the Mississippi River. And then you had the Powell Field and you had one other field I don’t remember right now.
Anyway, they were all discovered prior to World War II and the Korean War. And what had happened during those two wars, the U.S. was in need of steel, and so they went out and pulled all the casings out of the well. So, there was nothing left on top of the ground, but you could go out and find and say, here’s the well.
Yet we knew once you put the water in the lake, those were shallow, shallow production. Anywhere from 400-feet down to 8,000-feet down. But if you put enough hydrostatic head on that, we were worried that that pressure would cause that formation to push up. And all of the are saltwater-based production. So, you could have salt water and oil coming up, if you didn’t try to plug them.
Since saltwater is heavier than freshwater, it would just sit there on the bottom of the reservoir until it got so dense you picked it up and one of our intakes. So, the worry was that if we didn’t plug them, we could have a very large reservoir with a lot of pollution it.
So, we ended up going in and figuring out a way to find the old wells. And the water district actually became a producer of oil and gas. We had wells that, once we bought them from the companies, we would have to set up a schedule and a program. So, we had wells making 90 to 100 barrels of oil a day.
Well, you don’t want to plug those. You want to produce them just as long as you can right before you close the dam. So, that you can generate revenue to help pay for the cost of building the lake. So, we had, not only where we plugging wells, but we were producing probably 20 to 25 wells at the same time.
Mark O: I didn’t know that.
Woody F: At one time I had nine rigs running for me in Richland-Chambers. Every day. Either plugging wells or workable wells to get them back in production. Or some of them were on – we had saltwater disposal wells. We had to keep them going, too.
So, we were one of the larger oil and gas companies for that part of the world during that time. Because in ‘86, that’s when the bottom fell out of the oil and gas business. But yet, it didn’t bother us because we still had to plug it. And we still wanted to produce everything we could. So it was it was an interesting opportunity to come up with a way to find wells that no longer had any service to them.
Mark O: As long as I’ve worked here, I did not know that we were producing oil at the same time we were constructing Richland-Chambers Reservoir. And so this is the first. So you’re setting new light on some stuff.
Woody F: We had had to go to the Railroad Commission and file all the filings to become an oil and gas producer. And so you go back and you look at production records back in ‘89 through probably ‘86, ‘85, you’ll see the water district is listed as an oil and gas company.
Mark O: Wow, wow. what’s this reservoir construction is, you know, winding down. They’re starting to fill up the reservoir. I think we had a new general manager at the time
Woody F: We did. Jim Oliver came in in about ’86-‘87 timeframe. And I was still down in living in Corsicana, working at Richland. I was working on various projects for the district on the environmental side, and I was having to come to Fort Worth about three days a week. And I was kind of getting tired of that drive. So once my son graduated from high school, I decided to go ahead and come back to Fort Worth and start working out of the main office here.
At that point in time, Jim created the Environmental Division. We didn’t have an Environmental Division. I was just doing environmental work until we got into oil and gas. I mean, as it transitioned.
But Jim created the Environmental Division in about ‘ 86, no about ‘87 or ‘88 timeframe. And then with that, we transitioned into looking at watershed management to protect the water in the reservoirs. We looked at, started to do a lot more permitting. We had projects coming up, like our pipeline programs.
We had Benbrook Lake coming up. We had the pipeline from (trying to think, what do we call it?) It’s the pipeline from the Fort Worth, from the Fort Worth water treatment plant to Benbrook. Then after that, we had the pipeline from Benbrook up to Eagle Mountain.
All of those are requiring both state and federal permits in order to be able to get them built. So, we had a lot of permitting issues starting to come up. And so that’s why Jim decided to go ahead and create the Environmental Division.
Mark O: And then so you’re given that title. There’s some loose environmental stuff that we’re doing, but it’s not really centralized or anything. So what is your, what is your strategy for creating this department? How did that work?
So, generally back in those days originally it worked kind of like the East Texas reservoirs and West Side. So, we had Bridgeport and Eagle Mountain. So I had a, developed an environmental team out at Eagle Mountain. And hired Mark Ernst and, Mark is still with us.
And we set up programs there for starting to do water quality sampling. Both in the reservoirs, and the streams, and in the watershed to start developing databases, to be able to say, yes, the water is fine. It’s easily treatable.
Or number two, if we have pollution, we have a methodology set up to find pollution. Or three, things going on either new wastewater plant discharges that are going to be in our watersheds or in our lake.
We have a methodology now to say, yes, they’re treating the water to adequate water quality or no, we either need to close them or they need to increase the quality of their discharge. So, we started working toward defining protection and health of our of our reservoirs, as opposed to just taking whatever came.
We did the same thing in East Texas there and set up the sampling programs for both the reservoir and the watersheds and the creeks there, too. So, once we got Eagle Mountain set up, we then transitioned down to Richland and Cedar Creek. And that was run out of the Richard-Chambers office.
We did that for a while and are still doing it today. But the next major project coming out of that was the Richard-Chambers Wetlands project.
Back when we were building the reservoir, we had to do environmental mitigation because of the lake. One of the major components was, we took the property that we had acquired north of Hwy 287, and we got both the Corps and Texas Parks and Wildlife to agree that putting the property in public ownership and then having Parks and Wildlife to manage it would be enough to mitigate the impacts of Richard-Chambers.
So, when we did that, we had about 4,000-acres of public property that’s in the floodplain of the river. And I had been working with another biologist at Parks and Wildlife, a man by the name of Carl Frederickson. He and I fought a bunch on the permitting side. And then after the lake got permitted, we became very good friends.
We ended up coming up with original concept because we had a oil and gas company down there exploring it while we still owned the property. So, I would get with Carl and we would lay out the road system such that the roads themself became dikes to hold water in the wetlands there. That’s the early concept of wetlands at the R.C. wetland project.
From that, as the idea came to fruition of building the wetlands, utilizing the wastewater that comes down from the water we had provided to our customers, it obviously meant a pretty big lift on both water right permitting and Corps 404 permitting.
And, so we worked with our engineering firm, Alan Plummer Associates, to lay out the wetland system for the permitting. Went through that project and the project nearly got shut down.
And this is because in the Corps of Engineers 404 world, the Corps of Engineers actually just acting on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA. EPA actually has the overall authority on issuing permits. They’ve given the Corps the authority to issue it for them, if they agree.
I had a Corps of Engineers project manager, and we got very far along in both the design of the project and implementation of the permitting component. When the permitting guy at the Corps finally notified the EPA person over in Dallas, where Region 6 is.
That person came out and we met on site before the, in order to get it permitted to show him what it was built. And the EPA permit guy and the Corps of Engineers permit guy got into fight, a verbal fight out in the field. And the reason was the EPA guy felt like the Corps of Engineers didn’t give him adequate notice and he should have been involved in a big project like this early on.
So, he was fixing to recommend that it go up the chain and go all the way to Washington, D.C., at Department of Interior.
And so I ended up pulling both of them aside separately from each other. I didn’t focus on the argument – when did you know about it? I focused on here’s what we’re doing. The EPA permit writer, I said, what would you change? Why would you oppose this? This is taking bottomland hardwoods that were taken out years and years ago and turned into bermuda pastures. And Bermuda pastures are basically environmental desert. There’s nothing that lives there because it’s just the same ecology all the way through.
I said, so what would you change? His answer was, well, I really wouldn’t change anything. I just should have known about it earlier. So okay, I can’t help about that. All I can tell you is we’ve done a really good job laying out a project that creates a lot of aquatic habitat, and that’s what we’re trying to mitigate. And so finally he gave in and he just told the Corps of Engineers guy, ‘don’t ever do that again.’ But he backed off.
But it was kind of a fun opportunity, at one point in time in my career to be able to negotiate between the Corps of Engineers guy and an EPA guy that were fighting over when they should have told each other something. So that turned out well. Ultimately, we got the permit, we got it built. And it was the first constructed wetlands built in Texas, for sure, maybe in the United States, for the purpose of drinking water supply.
There are other wetlands built, but they’re built for treatment below wastewater plants mainly just to polish the water. But this is the first one, and it was the largest one ever built at that time for that purpose.
Mark O: And I do hear Alan Plummer was had a had an integral role in helping move this project along and helping you guys…
Woody F: Yeah. Alan himself and his staff were very instrumental because they helped come up with guidance. We actually tried three different projects and to decide which one is the one we wanted to move forward with.
One was similar just to building a water treatment plant on site. Take the water out of the river. R un it through the water treatment plant then put it in the lake. It would work. The problem is the water was too clean.
You wouldn’t want to take water coming out of a water treatment plant and put it into a reservoir. And it cost a lot of money. There’s a lot of chemicals involved, a lot of electricity involved. So we kind of nixed that one.
We had another idea that was a biological base idea. And that was you build these long troughs, and it has a conveyor belt at the bottom of the trough that just continuously moves. You take the water from the river and put it in these long troughs, and you put in fish that eat algae.
And so your goal was you’d had the fish eat the algae in the water. It would be there long enough for the sediment to fall out. So between the sediment and the the fish poop falling out, you had clean water. And it turned out it actually worked.
We used stone rollers as the type of fish that we were using at the time. And it worked really well. The only problem was the amount of troughs and fish you’d have to have to treat 198,000 acre-feet of water made it unusable. But we had documented it. We actually wrote a book about it and the Wetlands Project for other people to use so they would have some guidance for the future. But for a small water treatment plant, it would work real well.
Mark O: You would have to somehow keep birds from from eating that fish buffet.
Woody F: Yeah. You’d put a net over it or something. Yeah. But it was, you know, the biologist in me liked the idea. You’re using nature to treat the water, you know.
Mark O: Right.
Woody F: Which the wetlands is the same thing. And, you just get a much more additive benefit because of the habitat you create. The biology is there, the birds are there. People get to use it both from duck hunting to hog hunting to… I think it’s on the, the Audubon Christmas list where they go out and look for birds. So, it was a really good project that that came out of just a need to have water.
Mark O: Right. Just. Yeah, it’s a fantastic place if you ever get a chance to go down and visit that for sure. So, are you living the dream? I mean, is this what you imagined you’d be doing when you graduated from college? Or…
Woody F: I thought I’d end up probably being a game warden or a wildlife biologist for Texas Parks and Wildlife. So while I had ideas, this is, turned into a great career. I have loved every minute of it.
You know, once the wetlands were over, we migrated in to looking at permitting other projects. So right now I’m working on Cedar Creek Wetlands project, helping staff on that. Also looking at the Mary’s Creek project and helping staff on permitting that. We’re looking at what’s called a system operation permit and that’s a different concept of water supply permitting. But if we decide to do that, it’ll be a really good opportunity for the district, we think.
On the the other side of my job in an advisory role now is the Central City Panther Island Project.
Mark O: Right. Yeah. So, I do want to dive into that because that one, I guess maybe like all projects start off, as you know, hey, someone has an idea. And, you know, they start looking about, looking at things from a different perspective.
And they get people like you involved who begin with maybe some stuff that’s on paper and then turn it into reality. And one of the things that I know that you were heavily involved in was this environmental cleanup. So can you explain?
From what I read, it was like one of the largest environmental cleanup projects in the state of Texas at that time. Maybe, you know, still is, I don’t know, but what were they asking you to do when they brought you on board to get that project moving forward?
Woody F: So originally, the concept… the water district had another project a long time ago called Boyd Reservoir. That project was a project we looked at with the Corps. We did a feasibility study on it, and it was up out of Boyd, Texas. And really all it would have been was been a dry lake. And the idea was when the river flooded, it would fill the lake up. Take away some of the flood water and make the floodway handle the capacity it could. We got so much opposition from the locals, residences in the area that we ended up having to abandon that idea.
So, coming from that idea was the idea of the Central City Project. And that project is realigning the river and doing it in a manner such that we would either decrease the elevation of the flood or alternatively, do it in a manner so that the floodway could handle the proposed flows, which is the way we ended up going.
Woody F: So it’s design is to build a new channel about 1.5 to 1.8 miles long. And then we’re going to build detention basins along the way that as the water comes in or goes through, it spreads out into those detention basins. So, that once it leaves Fort Worth, it’s at the same capacity it was before. It stops, it keeps any additional flooding. And this project is preserving over 2,500 acres of property that would flood today, if we had that flood of design of that project.
So that was the concept. At that time the project manager for the district was Sandy Newby. Sandy was in charge of it for the water district. Jim was the general manager. And we were going through a study phase to say, with the Corps of Engineers, to say is this a feasible project to move forward with or not?
Sandy was a very good project manager. She put all the pieces together. One of the pieces was the environmental side that it requires for building a project of that nature. So, Sandy had asked for me to come in and help on, especially with the Corps, on all the environmental work.
I wasn’t involved in the rest of the pieces, but I was brought in for handling the 404 type permitting. Corps doesn’t and permit themselves, but they have to go through the permitting process. So I was brought in to help navigate that permitting so that we could build that project.
That ultimately ended up in the environmental impact statement that was put together for the project. Corps has to do environmental impact statements on their own projects, just like they require other people to.
At that point in time it went from kind of a feasibility study to implementation. Once the Corps came in and said that the project was buildable, they had terminology for it, but they basically say, ‘we’ve reviewed it. We’ve looked at it in regards to the National Environmental Policy Act. And it’s environmentally acceptable and technically sound. Once they officially make that decision, that then authorizes the Corps to move forward with actual construction of the project.
So, at that point in time, Jim then made me the project manager, to implement the project, because we still had found a lot of environmental issues. The contaminated soil that you were talking about. Plus, we had some mitigation that has to be done to build the project.
Plus, I had about 30 years of experience of working with Corps of Engineers. And he kind of thought that might help us a little bit, knowing the Corps and understanding how to work with the Corps. So, he brought me in as the project manager for Central City, Panther Island.
Woody F: And doing the environmental work for the environmental impact statement, One of the things you have to do is you have to look for where your project footprint is going to be. Is the soil or any water contaminated in that area? So we did our due diligence on looking at soil and water, and we ended up finding quite a bit of contaminated soil. So, from…
Mark O: And what was the source of the contaminated soil?
Woody F: Probably 10 or 15 different sources because it depends on what the contaminant is. We had, we found everything. There was a old petroleum refinery. So, it had a lot of oil. It’s called TPH. Total petroleum hydrocarbons that the soil had been contaminated with.
We had another one that was a brass foundry. It had a lot of brass, had a lot of zinc, it’s soil was contaminated with. We had a foundry that made, mostly at this time, they came in existence back in the ‘20s, but most of them make lids for sewer caps you see in the road 3 or 4ft in diameter, real thick. Their contamination mostly was led. So, we had a lot of lead contamination.
We had one site that had PCBs on it because they were a reclamation company, and they would just take any kind of metal that people would bring in. They would bring it. They’d crush it, and reclaim it. Well, somehow somebody brought some stuff in that had PCBs in it. So, we had to reclaim PCBs. So…
Mark O: So just kind of unregulated, older industrial type businesses that operated in that vicinity.
Woody F: And, and I can’t say that I found any one of them that I would think had violated the law. And the reason why – there weren’t any laws on disposal or how you actually operate a plant from a contamination standpoint until the late ‘70s.
So, all of this occurred long before, like you say, it’s an old industrial area. And this stuff occurred from the ‘20s all the way up into the ‘70s. So it’s all legal. It wasn’t like they were illegally doing it. It was just that’s the way you did business back in those days.
So far we’re working, we still have one more we’re working on, but so far we have cleaned up 29 different sites. We have remediated over 300,000 tons of soil. And, we have cleaned up, and I don’t remember Mark how many gallons of water, but something like 22 million gallons of water. We’ve got it the data. But…
Mark O: So that’s groundwater.
Woody F: Groundwater that we’ve actually cleaned up too. So we’ve cleaned up both soil and groundwater in this project. And we were, we were the largest single environmental remediation project that TCEQ had underway in the state. Now, I would imagine it probably still is. I don’t know, because I don’t talk to them much anymore.
Mark O: Okay.
Woody F: Not my job. I don’t advise.
Mark O: And then so that took quite a bit of time.
Woody F: That took about six years, seven years, something like that.
Mark O: What else? What was the other side of your role for that Central City Project?
Woody F: The way that the Corps of Engineers is regulated, when they’re issued a project of this nature, they have to have a local sponsor. They can’t build it without a local sponsor. And the water district is obligated to pay 35% of the total project costs. Federal government pays 65%.
So, we had multiple entities involved in the project. You had the Corps of Engineers. You have the water district. You have the city because the city has water lines and sewer lines that cross throughout this one-and-a-half-mile length. Because we’re taking roads out, you’re taking, easement areas out. So you have everything from a 72-inch sewer line to major high pressure water lines that cross. So, the city will have to remove and replace those.
And the bypass channel is 35-feet deep and over 100-feet wide. So, in order to keep service in that area, they have to go underneath. So, they have to go back and bore underneath the bypass channel.
Well, as you might guess, the Corps of Engineers have regulations on how you have to cross a federal project. So, part of my role was kind of the liaison between the City of Fort Worth and the Corps of Engineers, so we could keep both of them moving forward on projects.
In addition, we have franchise utilities. We have Atmos gas that have gas lines in here. You have telephone, AT&T. You’ve got Sprint. You’ve got cable, you’ve got fiber optics. All of those have to be relocated and either they either have to go around or they have to go under.
And the north bypass channel is different from the south. The north bypass channel, you hit rock at about 18 feet.
Woody F: And so if you’re going underneath, and remember the channel was like 35-feet deep, so they’ve got a bore real deep in rock.
The other issue that became kind of interesting is the area around Main, immediately north of Main s little ways, the Atmos gas line crosses. Well, if it’s 35 feet deep and it’s rock, guess what?
The Corps is going to probably have to have a contractor blast that rock to get it out. Atmos find out you’re going to be blasting around their, their high pressure gas line. They weren’t too interested in that. So, there were some fun negotiations that went on that allowed Atmos to go ahead and redo their pipeline. But at the same time gave the Corps the right to put in a contract to blast that rock out.
So, you had issues like that, that aren’t common everywhere, but you got to figure out a solution to make them work so you can move forward with the project.
So, one of my roles there was just the person who’s trying to keep the project moving forward on schedule, with all of the other partners that we had, and then having the Corps be able to approve it.
On the Corps of Engineers side, we were moving forward with, you know I said earlier, you have to dig areas out for the water to flow into during the flood. So, we were busy starting to develop those projects also.
So, we have an area that’s out on the east side of town right by Gateway Park. And we had an area there that we were turning into one of these water storage areas. Corps calls them valley storage sites. But they’re really just a bowl that you’re digging out. So when the river comes up, it fills up and stores the water.
We had one 35-acre site that we dug and the amount of material we took out of that… J.D. Granger was the overall director of the Central City Panther Island Project, and he kept up with that.
My job was just to get the dirt out and get it moved. But it would fill up like the Cowboys stadium, like half full is the amount of soil we had to move out of there in order to build a bowl just for the Valley storage. It was a huge site.
The good part about it is we were able to do it in, in a way such that we’re going to be able to let the city of Fort Worth expand Gateway Park into that area. So, we designed it so that they could have both soccer fields, concession stands, a splash park, basketball goal, parking area.
Woody F: That area, we’re going to end up at the lower section of it, we’re going to have to plant over 60,000 to 80,000 trees. We’re going to recreate a natural forest in that area. So, there’s going to be a nature trail that can be put in there.
So not only are we building a project for flood control, but we’re doing it in a way to expand public use of areas that are needed… public parks, soccer fields, basketball, all those kind of things. So, it’s been fun being creative and coming up with ways to do more than what the Corps normally does. Because the Corps normally builds a bypass channel, digs the hole for the water, and that’s all they do.
Not a problem. That’s what they’re authorized to do. That’s their job. Ours was to take their job and try to turn it into more than what it normally would be. And that’s what we were able to do.
Mark O: So add value to it for the people. It’s really cool to see projects like that when they get developed and, and you end up with something that you didn’t initially think about when you were going into it. But what ends up being so beneficial for people that are close by and the residents and, you know, just people that live in this area.
Woody F: Another site just like that is Riverside Park. We did the same thing there. The city has already come back and put recreation, recreational amenities there. The thing about it is you just work with the Corps and you tell the Corps, look, we need a soccer field. So, when you finish grading it, grade it flat, and you work with the city’s park designers to say, how would you like it left. So, all you have to do is come in and put the right kind of turf on the top, and you’ve got a soccer field.
So, those are the kind of things we did. We had parking areas, So, the Corps would cut it out, but they’d leave a big parking lot, a flat parking area that the city immediately came in and put asphalt in.
So, you’ve got access points to parks that otherwise would just been a big hole out there. So, those kind of opportunities are there if you just think through them and work with the people, you know, that have the responsibility, the Corps, to implement them. So it’s fun. You’re giving back to the public something that way.
Mark O: That’s cool. So, over the course of your career here, I believe it’s like pushing 45-years.
Woody F: If I make it to October this year, it’s either 44 or 45. I believe really close.
Mark O: Looking back, what what do you find the most rewarding?
Woody F: For me, one has been personal growth. Because I came into this wet behind the ears, thinking I was going to be a wildlife biologist or something. And walking around outside and looking for deer and telling how many, how many, animals are on a piece of property and turning into a career that has developed water for the public.
And not just by building a reservoir. Richland-Chambers was a major accomplishment for me on getting a permit. But actually doing the wetlands. I mean, taking a project that you’re not building a reservoir in. You’re building a project that the public gets to use and it gives it something back there, to establishing water quality programs within the district. Understanding what our reservoirs are and how they function.
Mark and his team do a lot of water quality modeling. They built models that predict what can happen in our lake if somebody discharges something. Should we fight it or should we not?
I mean, when I first started here, the water district’s program for water supply sampling was we had a guy who would go out in a boat on Eagle Mountain and take a quart jar and dip it in the water and take it to the City of Fort Worth lab. And sometimes that quart jar turned out to be a pickle jar. So, you might guess the water quality coming out of a pickle jar isn’t going to represent the water that was in the lake.
When Jim the established the environmental division, the first thing I did was I got that database that had been created and I threw it away. Because I knew you can’t make decisions on somebody going out, grabbing a, grabbing a sample of water in a bottle that was full of vinegar. pH is going to be just crazy on those kind of things.
So, establishing programs has been great. You know, giving guidance to the district, setting up programs, seeing them come to fruition. Wetlands is an example. Our water quality programs and our reservoir and our watersheds, looking at what’s coming in. I mean, we were one of the first ones in the state.
One of the programs that we have now here within the city is the area of jurisdiction that the water district has in the river is we were charged by EPA to be a co-applicant with the City of Fort Worth on the MS4 project. MS4 permit.
We kind of thought that initially because we didn’t think we had any responsibility. Once we found out we did, we’ve turned that into a benefit for the for the public, also. And that is, once we started a sampling program, we started having Rockin’ the River. Well, we needed to know how, what the water quality was before people got into the water.
So, we established a water quality sampling program that would give us guidance on – was it going to be a problem two days before Rockin’ the River ever happened?
Woody F: Coming out of that was a new permitting program the district has. Any new outfall, any new discharge that goes straight to the river or to a, in a junction to a stormwater pipe adjacent to our property. They have to have a permit from us. And they have to permit it based upon the water quality they’re now adding to the river.
So we’re protecting the river by having a new sampling program and managing what kind of pollutants are being allowed to hit the river. And making sure they’re minimized so they don’t impact the public use of the river. Those are all programs that didn’t exist, but I helped implement. Helped come up with ideas.
I don’t do it by myself. It’s, you’ve got a team of people. We have an environmental division. We have a Central City Project division.
All those people contribute. Everybody does it. But it it’s very satisfactory in my mind to know I was part of a group that came up with these programs that get implemented. Then you see how good they help the public once you implement them. So that’s been the fun part of the career. It’s never the same. We were always growing.
Mark O: So that’s really neat being able to turn around and hand off some of these accomplishments to the people that you’ve helped educate along the way, too. Because I know many of this team of people that you’re working with, and they’re fantastic at what they do, as well, and I’m sure they learned a lot from you.
So with that, I want to ask you a question that I’ve asked all these other guests, and that is what kind of advice would you have for somebody, like you when you started off, that you know, you didn’t really know where you were going to end up or what you were going to be doing 30 years down the road. So let’s say somebody has just started working here. They haven’t been working here that long. What sort of advice would you give them on TRWD and, and just navigating their future? And the career that they might find themselves in?
Woody F: I would tell them mainly that TRWD is a family. And if you will invest in the family, you can have a career that can get you as far as you want to go.
We’re a company. We manage ourselves like a company, but we’re also a family. TRWD and the people here care about each other personally. Not just, you. get your job done.
You invest in that. And, yeah. If you invest in yourself in the TRWD, you’ll find a home here that you can advance and be happy in.
Like when I started out here, I’m not doing anything like what I started out here, but it was because I invested in what, what opportunities were given to me.
Woody F: You can advance here, and you can find something that you really like to do. We have so many different opportunities in this organization.
When I started out there was probably 110, 112 people in the whole organization from Cedar Creek all the way up to Bridgeport. We’re now around 340, 350.
We’ve got various divisions. We didn’t have an engineering division back when I started.
Your opportunities here are, will be what you make them. Because it’s a great place to work. It really is.
Mark O: Awesome. Other than what we’ve talked about, is there anything else that you want to add?
Woody F: I don’t think so. I’ve covered pretty much everything I did. You pulled pretty much everything out of me, I think.
Mark O: Well, I tried, I tried. Well, Woody, really appreciate you being available and dropping in for a visit today. I don’t see your face around the office like I used to. So it’s really good to see you. You’ve always got a good temperament. And, you know, you’re just, just kind of a happy guy.
Woody F: Well, again, you make it what you want it to be. You know, if you want to be happy, you can be happy.
Mark O: All right. Great. Well, thank you very much, Woody.
Woody F: You’re welcome.
