USACE_SWF_History_Book Example.pdf

C H A N G E S

CHALLENGES

C H A M P I O N S

A HISTORY OF THE

FORT WORTH DISTRICT

ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS

2 0 0 0 – 2 0 1 1

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Preface

Chapter 1 – The Fort Worth District Enters the Twenty-First Century

Chapter 2 – The Fort Worth District at War

Chapter 3 – Wartime Military Construction in the Fort Worth District

Chapter 4 – Post-9/11 Emergency Operations

Chapter 5 – War-end Civil Works and District Changes

Appendix I– Timeline of the Fort Worth District

Appendix II– Fort Worth District Commanders

Appendix III–Distinguished Civilian Awardees

Appendix IV – Commonly Used USACE Fort Worth District Acronyms

Endnotes

A Note About Sources

Select Bibliography

Foreword

This illustrated history is the third publication to highlight the history of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Fort Worth District. The first, Rivers, Rockets and Readiness: Army Engineers in the Sunbelt, by Dr. Clayton Brown, tells the story of the creation of the District and the first 25 years of its operations. The second publication, Ser-vice—Tradition—Change, by Lisa Mighetto and William F. Willingham, captures the District’s en-vironment, challenges, and accomplishments from 1975 through 1999.

As the 24th Commander of this distinguished Engineer District, it is with great pride that I intro-duce this update to the Fort Worth District his-tory from 2000 to 2011, Changes—Challenges —Champions. This book highlights an extraordi-nary period not only within the Fort Worth District boundaries but also inside and outside of our nation’s borders. It goes without saying that we could not have achieved our mission goals, nor met our many challenges and accomplishments, without being set up for success by those who came before us. The bar has always been set high here in Fort Worth and it is our people that continue to carry that standard forward.

Created in the aftermath of an iconic flood in 1949, the Fort Worth District primarily focused on flood control and the construction of large dams during its first decade. In the 1960s and 1970s the District became more involved in wa-tershed management and restoring wetlands. In the 1980s the Fort Worth District saw an increase in military construction. And the Water Resources Development Act of 1990 established environ-mental protection as a primary mission for the Corps of Engineers, which the District had already been doing throughout the prior decade.

The District headed into the new millennium with an ominous start due to the overshadowing possi-bilities of technological disaster with Y2K, and then faced new challenges with the 9/11 attacks, followed by an incredible flood at Canyon Lake in 2002. Again and again the people of the Fort Worth District showed their resiliency and resolve to support their communities and the nation both domestically and overseas. The ever-increasing high operations tempo fueled by the Global War on Terrorism, two major military operations, Base Realignment and Closure Commission mandates, a restructuring Army, and a full dossier of civil works projects didn’t stop this amazing team, but allowed it to accom-plish the District’s mission better, faster, and more cost effectively, while remaining environmentally friendly.

As the nation, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the Fort Worth District continue to evolve to meet future challenges, we remain true to our heritage. We will give America our best in planning, designing, building, and operating water resources and other civil works projects. We will provide our military, their fami-lies, and communities with the best-designed, constructed, and managed facilities. And during national emergencies or disasters those count-ing on us will continue to receive what they de-serve—our best.

As you peer into this window in the life of a living organization called the Fort Worth Dis-trict, I hope you will gain knowledge and ap-preciation for what the people of the District do in the service of their country. They are an en-gineer force of highly trained, qualified civilians and soldiers standing tall, and ready to answer the call to duty.

Richard J. Muraski, Jr.

Colonel, U.S. Army

Former Commander, Fort Worth District, and current Deputy Commander, Southwestern Division

Acknowledgments

This book could not have been completed without the help of many people, including USACE friends, History Associates colleagues, and fam-ily members throughout this nine-month project.

Consequently, a round of acknowledgements is in order for those who helped make this work possible in such an aggressive time frame.

First, I would like to thank USACE Fort Worth District Public Affairs Specialist Ed Rivera, who served as the District’s project manager and was a true collaborator in this effort. Ed made avail-able all of the significant historical materials that the Public Affairs Office had maintained over the years and performed on-call yeoman duty as a research assistant throughout the manuscript’s preparation. He also scheduled oral history in-terviews and served as a proofreader, selected all of the photographic illustrations from his ex-tensive catalog of images, and then captioned them. In Fort Worth, he introduced me to the Trinity River Vision Authority and the Central City Project, and then guided me to the Canyon Lake Dam about thirty-five miles northeast of San An-tonio, where together we hiked the breathtaking gorge created there by the July 2002 flood. Ed likewise traveled with me to Fort Bliss in El Paso, the White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico, and to San Antonio to help me do field research on the various large-scale District projects located within those areas, especially at Joint Base San Antonio and the San Antonio Mis-sion Reach. Without his input and help, this book would never have come to fruition.

Ed’s colleague Clay Church led an expedi-tion to Dallas, where he gave us a detailed tour of the Johnson Creek project, the Dallas Flood-way Extension project, and Wetland Cell D, be-fore taking us through what will become Trinity Uptown in Fort Worth. Jeff Watts at District head-quarters provided an excellent formal briefing of the Fort Bliss Expansion project, while Mark Lane similarly briefed us in San Antonio on the impor-tant BRAC 2005 and MILCON projects there.

Penny K. Foster, Hords Creek Lake, came up with the book’s title and Andre Mayeaux, ACE-IT, de-signed the cover. On the contracting front, Dis-trict Contract Specialist Sue Jones did an outstanding job in handling the original award and ensuring that no administrative issues arose throughout the project on USACE’s end.

Oral histories were key to this history update.

I therefore want to sincerely thank the following Fort Worth District leaders and project manag-ers who took time out from their busy schedules to speak with me to share their stories and per-spectives: Colonel (ret.) Gordon Wells, Colonel (ret.) John Minahan, Colonel Christopher Martin, Colonel Richard Muraski, Lieutenant Colonel (ret.)

Robert Morris, Troy Collins, Peggy Grubbs, Steve Wright, Paul Krebs, Tony Semento, Charlie Burger, Elston Eckhardt, Bill Fickel, and Jimmy Baggett.

At History Associates, I also want to thank my History Division director, Dr. Kenneth Durr, for his support and encouragement; first in preparing our original proposal and then while I was working long hours to meet the project’s necessarily tight deadlines. Manuscript Specialist Gail Mathews and editor Vanessa Lide clarified my prose and identified and corrected the obscurest of typo-graphical errors in the manuscript. Additionally, my historian colleague Kim Silvi served as an outstanding research assistant early in this project, locating and capturing key documents and publi-cations from USACE’s virtual online library.

History Associates’ front office support staff members Camille Regis and Nancy Crenca also provided logistical support for the project, mak-ing travel arrangements and handling routine ad-ministrative functions at our Rockville, Maryland office. Finance and Contracts Director Donald Donoghue also expertly managed billing and con-tractual issues for History Associates throughout the project. I likewise want to extend my sincer-est thanks to History Associates’ President Emeri-tus and Board Chairman Phil Cantelon, President

Brian Martin, and Division Directors Mike Reis and James Lide, who shared their wisdom and guidance with me, based on their own unique experiences as professional historians and re-searchers in the federal arena.

Finally, I want to thank my wife Samantha, my two children Joshua and Cassandra, my par-ents Fay and Phillip Rife, and my mother-in-law Donna Hummel, all of whom who helped hold down the home front while I traveled back and forth to Texas through the spring and summer working on this project. Without their support, I would have never been able to complete it.

Thanks to all!

Jamie Rife

The Author

James P. Rife is a Senior Historian with History Associates Incorporated, joining the company in 2001 as a public historian, with wide experience in military, naval, and Native American his-tory. He authored The Sound of Freedom: U.S. Naval Weapons Technology at Dahlgren, Virginia, 1918-2005, published in 2007, as well as Caring & Curing: A History of the Indian Health Ser-vice and Bridges to Baghdad: The U.S. Navy Seabees in the Iraq War, both of which were published in 2009. Mr. Rife earned a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering technol-ogy at Bluefield State College in May 1993, and a bachelor of arts degree in history (magna cum laude) at King College in Bristol, Tennessee in June 1997. From August 1997 to June 1999, he studied American history at Virginia Tech, earning a master’s degree in 1999.

Preface

“Essayons” is French for “Let us try.” The phrase’s military subtext originated during the Revolutionary War when professional French military engineers joined the nascent U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) and helped turn the tide of battle against the British. USACE adopted the phrase as its motto before the War of 1812, and has faithfully lived up to its spirit and mean-ing while carrying out its military construction and civil works missions through the years. USACE’s determination to continue this distinguished legacy of success is embodied in its famous march, appropriately called “Essayons,” the lyr-ics of which go:1

Essayons, sound out the battle cry.

Essayons, we’ll win or we’ll die.

Essayons. There’s nothing we won’t try.

We’re the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Pin the Castle on my collar.

I’ve done my training for the team.

You can call me an engineer soldier.

The warrior spirit has been my dream.

We are builders, we are fighters.

We are destroyers just as well.

There’ve been doubters who met with the sappers and then we blew them all to hell.

Our brothers fighting on the battle field look to us to point the way.

We get there first and then we take the risks to build the roads and airstrips and bridge the might river streams.

We don’t care who gets the glory we’re sure of one thing this we know somewhere out there an engineer soldier designed the plan for the whole darn show.

Essayons, whether in war or peace we will bear our red and our white.

Essayons. We serve America and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Essayons.

Essayons.

Essayons became the motto of USACE’s Fort Worth District by extension when the new Dis-trict was created in 1950 out of the Galveston District following the 1949 Fort Worth Flood. The Fort Worth District immediately embraced the “Let us try” heritage and became USACE’s lead dis-trict for military construction (MILCON) and civil works, in both peace and war, during its first fifty years of existence. This early history was cap-tured in two previous works: Rivers, Rockets, and Readiness: Army Engineers in the Sunbelt: A His-tory of the Fort Worth District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1950-1975 by D. Clayton Brown of Texas Christian University; and Service–Tradi-tion–Change: A History of the Fort Worth District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1975-1999 by Lisa Mighetto and William F. Willingham.

Much has happened since 1999, and the United States, USACE, and the District have all significantly changed after meeting a series of intense challenges, foreign and domestic, and natural and man-made, that forever altered the fabric of American society and culture, our secu-rity and foreign relationships, and even the land-scape. Each time, the District rose to the occasion and contributed solutions to seemingly unsolv-able problems, often under difficult circumstances and occasionally in the line of fire. Consequently, the District’s leadership decided to commission this history update in March 2012, under Con-tract W9126G-12-P-0073, to tell the story of the Fort Worth District’s key staff members, expan-sive activities, and cutting-edge projects since 1999 before that corporate memory is lost through retirements, transfers, and promotions.

Although the District comprises a close-knit, 800-strong team of champions, all of whom have contributed to the organization’s long-term suc-cess, this book necessarily takes a “top down” approach by focusing on key leaders and project managers, as they struggled to carry out the District’s local and regional missions while also supporting USACE’s larger efforts at the national and international levels, in accordance with fed-eral law and the requirements of its customers, co-sponsors, and partners.

The book is organized into five chapters and follows a roughly chronological narrative. The first chapter begins in early 2000, as Colonel James S. Weller relinquishes command to Colonel Gor-don Wells, who discovers the true size and scope of the District’s military and civil works responsi-bility as he leads the Fort Worth District into the twenty-first century. The chapter covers the District’s organization as it existed from 2000 to 2002, and focuses primarily on civil works and lake operations, which dominated the District project portfolio during that time. It concludes with the Canyon Lake Flood of July 2002, which carved a geologically significant new gorge below the dam’s emergency spillway. Chapter 2 begins with 9/11 and the District’s response to the Global War on Terror, and then recounts the story of USACE’s Forward Engineers Support Teams (FESTs) as well as Colonel Wells’s deployment to Iraq and the early nation-building work of Task Force Fajr and Task Force RIO in 2003.

The third chapter picks up after Wells and Task Force Fajr return home in 2003. It highlights USACE’s regionalization and transformation ef-forts, followed by the massive military construc-tion (MILCON) projects at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Joint Base San Antonio, and elsewhere within the District from 2005 to 2011, which were legally mandated by the Base Realignment and Closure

Commission of 2005. Chapter 4 focuses on the District’s Emergency Operations since the 2002 Canyon Lake Flood, with Branch Chiefs Paul Krebs and then Tony Semento leading the recov-ery and relief teams through such notable natu-ral disasters as Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, the Central Texas Floods of 2007, and the tornado outbreak of April and May 2011, among other events.

The fifth and final chapter deals with the District’s new emphasis on civil works in a post- Katrina environment, such as the Dallas Flood-way Extension (DFE), the Central City Project in Fort Worth, and the Mission Reach in San Anto-nio, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan slowly wind down and the great MILCON and BRAC projects are completed on schedule. The last chapter also covers the impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 on the District and then closes with a discussion of the changes on the horizon as the Fort Worth District wrestles with declining budgets and a more difficult political atmosphere for earmarked projects.

From a historical perspective, we hope that this work will educate and inform general read-ers, USACE staff members, members of Con-gress, policy makers, and the military engineering community about the Fort Worth District’s activi-ties and operations since 1999 and how its role has changed in recent years. The District is not only a regional asset for the states of Texas, Loui-siana, and New Mexico, but also a national asset for USACE, the U.S. Army, and the country at large. We are therefore pleased to present this book as a testament to the hard work and dedi-cation of the Fort Worth District champions who have made it a worldwide leader in both military and civil works engineering through their indomi-table “Essayons” spirit.

James P. Rife, Senior Historian, History Associates Incorporated

In the spring of 2000, Colonel James S. Weller still led the Fort Worth District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), a command he had held since November 1997. Both he and his pre-decessor, Colonel Peter T. Madsen, had overseen fundamental changes in the Fort Worth District’s organizational structure, its professional staff, and how it had operated as a result of the Clinton administration’s “Reinventing Government” initia-tive and post-Cold War military down sizing. Un-der Weller and Madsen, the Fort Worth District also experienced a technological revolution by embracing more powerful personal computers, the Internet, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and computer-aided design (CAD) soft-ware, among many other advanced engineering innovations that marked the 1990s. These sto-ries and others were recounted in the District’s updated history, Service–Tradition–Change: A History of the Fort Worth District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1975-1999, published under his authority in 2000. Weller’s command was draw-ing to a close, however, and in the history’s Fore-word, he briefly reflected upon the District’s first fifty years of achievement and predicted that its missions would continue to evolve and incorpo-rate even newer technologies, while providing a skilled and dedicated work force to the region and the nation. He also hoped that the success sto-ries presented in that history would “serve as a reminder of what we have accomplished and as a beacon to the possibilities of achievement that lie ahead of us.”1

Indeed, Weller had good reason to be opti-mistic. Despite the challenges of restructuring and realignment in the 1990s, the Fort Worth Dis-trict remained a robust organization with a rich history as it marched toward the twenty-first cen-tury. It was originally established in 1950 within the Southwestern Division of USACE as an off-shoot of the much older Galveston District be-cause of disastrous flooding in central Texas, as described in Rivers, Rockets, and Readiness:

Army Engineers in the Sunbelt: A History of the Fort Worth District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1950-1975, by D. Clayton Brown of Texas Chris-tian University. That flood was memorialized in a famous photograph of a local downtown Fort Worth landmark, the Montgomery Wards build-ing (now Montgomery Plaza), inundated up to its

CHAPTER 1

The Fort Worth District Enters the Twenty-First Century

The Montgomery Wards Department Store near downtown Fort Worth during the 1949 flood of the Clear Fork of the Trinity River.

(USACE photograph)

The Fort Worth District Enters the Twenty-First Century second story with water. So flood control had necessarily been the District’s civil works priority during those early years, epitomized by the con-struction and operation of large dam projects, the last being completed in 1991.2

The District had also successfully managed a wide range of other civilian works projects, most of which required regulatory oversight and com-pliance under a growing body of environmental and cultural resources preservation legislation, including the Watershed Protection and Flood Prevention Act of 1954, National Historic Preser-vation Act of 1966, National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1972 (renamed the Clean Water Act in 1977), Endangered Species Act of 1973, and Water Resources Development Act of 1974 (reautho-rized and amended in subsequent years). Navi-gating and enforcing these laws while playing the role of honest broker, often of competing priori-ties and interests, had forced the District to be-come more sophisticated and attuned to state and local concerns, particularly on environmental and cultural issues. Additionally, District personnel had participated in many emergency and disaster re-lief operations throughout its first fifty years of existence, most recently during Tropical Storm Charley and Hurricane Georges in 1998, and also after the tornado outbreak of May 1999, when fifty-one tornadoes had torn through Oklahoma.

Water rights issues were likewise at the forefront of District operations and would undoubtedly re-main there in the distant future, as new census data from 2000 showed that the population of Texas had ballooned to 20.8 million residents and was projected to double to 40 million by 2050.

There was only so much water to go around, and the District had the unenviable task of allocating it through the reservoirs. The population explo-sion promised to make the job even tougher.3

On the military front, the District had spear-headed numerous major construction projects for the Army and Air Force at some of the country’s largest—and most important—military facilities.

It had then supported several high-profile federal civilian agencies as their engineering needs ma-terialized, grew, and changed over the years.

Moreover, the District had developed very close working relationships with state and local authori-ties and also with grass roots community part-ners, with whom it had collaborated on a variety of business, environmental, and ecological is-sues. By 2000, the Fort Worth District had earned a stellar reputation for its engineering prowess and its ability to negotiate agreements and solu-tions with project stakeholders, and was recog-nized by USACE as a leading district, a distinction that filled the outgoing Weller with great pride.

On July 17, 2000, Weller formally relinquished command of the Fort Worth District and moved on to his next assignment as the new commander of the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Devel-opment Center in Vicksburg, Mississippi. His successor was Colonel Gordon M. Wells. A Vir-ginian by birth and a registered professional en-gineer in the Commonwealth, Wells’s USACE roots ran deep. His father was a career Army officer whose last job had been as the Deputy Chief of Engineers before his 1984 retirement.

So Wells virtually grew up in the Corps and around its projects, and he developed a natural inclina-tion for a military engineering career during his youth. He graduated from West Point in 1979 and later earned two master’s degrees, one in civil engineering from Virginia Tech and another in military arts and sciences at the School of Ad-vanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kan-

(USACE photograph)

Colonel Gordon M. Wells, while deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Wells was the Fort Worth District Commander from July 2001 through May 2003.

A History of the Fort Worth District U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 2000-2011 sas. His subsequent career had been command track, and he spent much of it overseas in either Germany or Japan, with intervening assignments at Fort Drum, New York, Fort Lewis, Washing-ton, and Fort Ord, California. After attending the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylva-nia, he spent a year at USACE headquarters before his selection as the twenty-first District Engineer in Fort Worth.4

Since Wells had served mostly as a com-bat engineer during his career, he was relatively new to the world of domestic civil works. He set out to survey his new command and its myriad responsibilities over the next few weeks.

What he learned during his briefings and site visits was daunting. Bounded to the west by the Albuquerque District, to the north by the Tulsa District, to the east by part of the Little Rock District, and to the south and southeast by the Galveston District, the Fort Worth Dis-trict was big by most standards and one of the largest of USACE’s forty-one districts.5

Geographically, the District sprawled across central Texas, but because of its divergent civil works and military construction missions, it had two different operating boundaries. The civil works boundary, drawn according to the cen-tral region’s natural waterways and drainage basins, encompassed roughly two-thirds of the state and a small portion of Louisiana. Within this large area, the District managed and oper-ated twenty-five multiple purpose water re-source projects and dams and portions of ten river basins from the Rio Grande River in the Southwest to the Red River in the Northeast, with the Trinity, San Antonio, Guadalupe, Nueces, Brazos, Sulphur, and Lower Colorado River basins lying in between. The District’s lakes and dams included Aquilla Lake (com-pleted in 1983), Bardwell Lake (1965), Belton

(USACE Files)

Fort Worth District civil works boundaries.

Lake (1954), Benbrook Lake (1952), Canyon Lake (1964), Jim Chapman Lake/Cooper Dam (1991), Georgetown Lake (1979), Granger Lake (1980), Grapevine Lake (1952), Hords Creek Lake (1948), Joe Pool Lake (1985), Lake O’ the Pines (1959), Lavon Lake (1953), Lewisville Lake (1955), Navarro Mills Lake (1963), Proc-tor Lake (1963), Ray Roberts Lake (1987), Sam Rayburn Lake (1965), Somerville Lake (1967), Stillhouse Hollow (1968), Town Bluff Dam/B.A.

Steinhagen Lake (1953), Waco Lake (1964), Whitney Lake (1951), and Wright Patman Lake (1953). The District also ran three hydroelec-tric power plants and 197 fully staffed parks, with over 25 million visitors each year. Alto-gether, the District maintained water resources and provided flood control across a 410,000-square-mile area, supplying Texas with about 35 percent of its potable water and protecting 58 percent of the state’s population. It estimated that the reservoirs had prevented billions of dollars of flood damage since their construc-tion, a benefit-to-cost ratio of 8.2 to 1.

The District’s military boundary was some-what larger since it was also responsible for design and construction at the region’s princi-pal military installations not only in Texas but also in parts of New Mexico and Louisiana.

Design and construction of barracks, family housing, training and aircraft facilities, schools, child care centers, clinics, and hospitals were typical District projects at such posts as Fort Hood, Fort Sam Houston, Fort Bliss, and Lackland, Dyess, Randolph, and Laughlin Air Force bases in Texas, Fort Polk in Louisiana, and the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The Galveston District and part of the Tulsa District had relinquished their military construction missions years before, so the Fort Worth District oversaw military construction within their boundaries as well. Among the most notable District projects over the years were support facilities for the B-1B bomber at Dyess (1985), the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Acad-emy at Fort Bliss (1987), the III Corps Head-quarters at Fort Hood (1989), and the Large Blast/Thermal Simulator at White Sands (1994).

Likewise, from 1992 to 1996, the District had built the new 475-bed Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston, the largest mili-tary hospital in the world, at a cost of $238 mil-lion. It also handled office space leasing for more than four hundred recruiting stations. All of these facilities were vital to the national de-fense, and maintaining them in a high state of readiness was a heavy responsibility to bear.

For fiscal year 2001, the District’s work load amounted to $689 million, with $417 million allo-cated for Army projects, $126 million for the Air Force, $76 million for civil works, and $30 million

(USACE Files)

Fort Worth District military boundaries.

for environmental-related projects. Forty million dollars was also allocated for the District’s “Sup-port For Others” (SFO) program, which included projects for federal agencies outside the District:

the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Bureau of Pris-ons, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), General Services Administration (GSA), Interna-tional Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC), Bureau of Engraving and Printing, Environmen-tal Protection Agency (EPA), U.S. Postal Service (USPS), Fish and Wildlife Service, Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), Na-tional Park Service (NPS), Joint Task Force Six, and the Departments of Justice, Commerce, En-ergy, State, and Housing and Urban Develop-ment. These represented a growing customer base outside the District that recognized its unique engineering, design, and project management capabilities and sought to take advantage of it through long-standing collaborations. It was a win-win deal for all involved.6

The INS was a key customer, having chosen the District to serve as the agency’s national ac-count manager for planning, design, and con-struction activities across the United States. The INS account manager resided in Fort Worth and served as the “one door to the Corps,” managing an annual multi-million-dollar program in which work was forwarded to appropriate geographic civil district project managers for right-of-first-con-sideration for execution.

The District also had a very important envi-ronmental mission as part of its portfolio. As the Environmental Compliance Assessment System district for the Southwestern Division, the Fort Worth District assisted U.S. Army, Army Reserve, and National Guard facilities with environmental assessments of their operations in accordance with the extensive environmental legislation and regulations on the books. The District also acted as the project manager for environmental reme-dial operations at active duty military bases for the Installation Restoration and Base Realign-ment and Closure (BRAC) programs. The District’s work on the Formerly Used Defense Sites (FUDS) program, started by the Army in 1986 to repair environmental damage caused by past military activities, was a top priority for safety reasons since unexploded ordnance and toxic wastes, including asbestos and other dangerous substances such as polychlorinated biphenyls, trichloroethylene, perchlorates, and heavy met-als still contaminated the sites of old military posts located within the District’s area of operations.

The District also issued permits for and monitored waste discharges into waterways. As career USACE environmental manager Bill Fickel later put it, “Anything you do in the waters of the United States, you’ve got to come to the Corps for a permit.” Many of the District’s civilian customers took advantage of its environmental expertise and contracted for all types of assessments, surveys, investigations, testing, design, and remediation at their own sites. The work load became so heavy that the District created a new Environ-mental Division to handle it all.7

From an organizational standpoint, Wells now led an Executive Office and six divisions, with some nine hundred mostly civilian staff members, all working together as a well-oiled team. The six divisions included the Programs & Project Man-agement Division, Operations Division, Contract-ing Division, Engineering & Construction Division, new Environmental Division, and Real Estate Di-vision. The Executive Office served as the District’s administrative and budgetary nerve cen-ter, carried out USACE policies and regulations, and coordinated all of the District’s activities. The Programs & Project Management Division super-vised a wide range of projects for the District’s military, civil works, environmental, and other cus-tomers, while the Operations Division was respon-sible for managing the dams, lakes, and recreational areas. The Contracting Division handled District procurement matters such as solicitations, bids, and contracts, while the Engi-neering & Construction Division carried out ac-tual design, site preparation, and construction work on the projects. And the new Environmen-tal Division served as the District’s principal in-vestigator, planner, and enforcer of federal regulations concerning the environment and cul-tural resources.

The Real Estate Division played a quiet but equally important role in District operations, es-pecially in the BRAC era. It was responsible for the appraisal, acquisition, and disposal of land for both military and civil works projects located throughout the District. Additionally, the Real Es-tate Division administered the Homeowners As-sistance Program (HAP) for the region. HAP was created in 1995 to financially help eligible civilian and military property owners who were unable to sell their homes under reasonable terms and con-ditions when the local real estate market was adversely affected by the closure or partial clo-sure of a military installation or a reduction in its scope of operations. HAP offered three types of benefits. The first was the reimbursement of losses sustained in selling a home on the open market if that home’s value had suddenly dropped below the amount owed on its mortgage because of BRAC. The next benefit was the government’s acquisition of the home if reasonable efforts to sell it failed. Finally, the government offered re-imbursement to affected homeowners for fore-closure expenses if it came to that.8

Fortunately for Wells, he had strong support from the Deputy District Engineer, Michael J.

Mocek. Mocek had served both as Deputy Dis-trict Engineer and as Chief of the Programs & Project Management Division since 1996 and was well respected among his peers. A retired Lieu-tenant Colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves, Mocek was a professional engineer and an adjunct fac-ulty member at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. He had earned both his bachelor of science in agri-cultural engineering and his master of science in civil engineering at Texas Tech University before joining USACE in 1971. Most of his career had been spent in the Fort Worth District, with a de-tour through the Albuquerque District from 1980 to 1985 where he had been a project engineer for the Southern Colorado Project Office. Mocek would ably serve as the commander’s right-hand man and ultimately play a key role in future Dis-trict operations, even after Wells finished his three-year rotation.9

Wells could also count on a strong leader-ship team among the divisions to keep the Dis-trict functioning smoothly. Larry O. Rogers, who led the Engineering and Construction Division, and Rogers’s Assistant Chief, James D. “Jimmy” Baggett, became key advisors, as well as Dwight

Quarles, who ran the Operations Division. He also came to trust the judgment of Ronald J. “Ron” Ruffenach, who served not only as his Public and Legislative Affairs Officer but also as his Execu-tive Assistant. Ruffenach became a good friend of Wells and helped him navigate the occasion-ally difficult waters of community and congres-sional relations, particularly on environmental and cultural resources matters.10

One of the very first issues that Wells had to address after taking command concerned dam-age to a Caddo Indian burial mound at Lake O’ the Pines. He was summoned by Texas State Historic Preservation Officer Bill Martin to a meet-ing in Jefferson with the Caddos to explain why the District supposedly had cut through the mound during a park improvement project. “It was not an initial happy meeting,” he recalled, but “we worked through it in a fairly friendly manner.” The issue was resolved following discussions with Martin, Caddo chairperson LaRue Parker, Lake Manager Jerry Thomas, and District Archaeolo-gist Dan McGregor, in which USACE drafted a Programmatic Agreement to identify a more com-prehensive approach to enforcing federal laws and protecting cultural sites on federal property.

The District also later facilitated a reburial and dedication ceremony at Jim Chapman Lake, and from that point forth, Wells enjoyed a good rela-tionship with the Caddos.11

Despite the abrupt introduction to the District’s cultural resources issues, Wells’s command tran-sition was seamless. He soon settled into his office and, through the divisional leadership and staff, began managing the District’s civil works and lake and recreational functions on a daily basis, reviewing and adopting new operating and use policies, updating hunting and fishing regu-lations, and authorizing maintenance, improve-ments, and repair to District parks, dams, and other related facilities. He took a special interest in water safety, and in May 2001, the District kicked off an extended water safety campaign targeting the three peak summer holiday week-ends, Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Labor Day. “With another hot Texas summer approaching, thousands of people will be com-ing to our lakes to cool off,” he said. “We want everyone to have fun and enjoy our lakes, but we want them to be extremely careful so they can come back next year.”12

Water safety was a deadly serious business for USACE. In 1971, before any water safety programs existed, 475 drownings occurred at Corps lakes throughout the country. As the prob-lem became endemic, USACE established a na-tional campaign in 1986 with the theme “Your Safety—Our Concern,” and the number of drownings began decreasing significantly, to 230 that year even though visitation had doubled. By 1994, the number had decreased to 154 nation-wide.13

The Fort Worth District had previously counted thirty-eight drownings at its lakes in 1996, twenty-four in 1997, thirty in 1998, thirty in 1999, and forty-six in 2000. This upward trend was unac-ceptable, particularly for young children, and since water levels were high because of heavy spring rains, Wells redoubled the District’s efforts to com-bat it. He directed Ruffenach and the Public Af-fairs Office to heavily promote a life jacket giveaway program at several lakes, in partner-ship with local safety and medical organizations.

This program had originally begun in 1998 as a way to educate the public on water safety and correct usage of personal floatation devices, and he fully intended to continue it. “We see so many children at our lakes who either don’t wear life jackets or wear them and other personal flotation devices that are worn out, sized wrong, or totally unacceptable as life-saving equipment,” Wells said. He hoped that the public would heed the warning, but by late June, there were already thir-teen confirmed recreational drownings in District lakes, all preventable. With the July 4 holiday coming up, Ruffenach issued an even more in-sistent Media Advisory, noting the deaths and the District’s concern that “many more may die if they don’t take water safety seriously.” “Please help us get this water safety message out to your au-diences,” he pleaded, “because any body of wa-ter is a potential death trap.” His campaign was somewhat effective—there were only twenty-two drownings in 2001.14

Boating congestion was likewise becoming a major issue for Wells and the District, as Texas’s population was growing at an exponential rate and more and more people were using District lakes for fishing and recreation. There were sim-ply too many boats now cruising the lakes, re-sulting in higher incidences of collisions and near misses, and a new policy was clearly needed for water-related recreational development.

Requests for new marina development at Lewisville Lake in the 1990s had already sparked District action. In the fall of 1997, the District un-dertook a comprehensive study of Lewisville Lake, in partnership with the North Central Texas Council of Governments, acting on behalf of eleven governmental bodies and several lease-holders who agreed to share half of the study’s cost. The effort consisted of two phases, the first being a water-related recreation use study and the second a lake-wide programmatic environ-mental assessment. The entire study was com-pleted in December 1998 and provided the District with the base-level information necessary to “de-termine and prudently allocate facilities and ser-vices required for new water-related development, including marinas.” On the basis of the study, the

(USACE photograph)

James Murphy and park rangers from Lavon, Bardwell, and Whitney Lakes talk to the public about ecosystem restoration and water safety in downtown Dallas during the EPA Environmental Fair, April 25, 2002.

District enacted a water-related development policy that went into effect in February 1999, which established a median safety standard of eighteen acres of water per boat. Fourteen acres per boat was considered the minimum and twenty-two acres per boat the maximum. The policy would be carried out by regulating future development and controlling the number and lo-cation of available facilities, including ramps and parking spaces, that contributed to the numbers of boats on the lake.15

With the Lewisville Lake policy thus set, the District realized that to some degree all of its lakes were experiencing increasing demand for surface space and little previous consideration had been given to future development. While the other lakes did not necessarily have the same boating use characteristics as Lewisville, there were com-mon factors that contributed to water surface con-gestion, including the presence of USACE and outgranted boat ramp parking spaces, wet slips, and dry stack slips at marinas, yacht clubs, and private docks. Since the District’s main concerns were resource protection, water safety, and user enjoyment as affected by the number of vessels on a lake during peak use hours on peak use days, it decided to enact a blanket water-related development policy for the other twenty-four lakes. The restrictions were in line with other Dis-trict resource management policies that placed constraints on visitors’ use, such as requiring campers to use only designated areas, limiting the size of parking lots at beaches and picnic ar-eas to reduce crowding, and limiting the num-bers of hunters at some lakes to improve safety and enjoyment.

On April 30, 2002, Operations Division Chief Dwight Quarles and Real Estate Division Chief Hyla J. Head jointly signed a comprehensive new policy that established “a goal of 22 acres of wa-ter per boat during peak use times as the District’s standard for resource protection and user enjoy-ment,” effective immediately. This figure was derived from the more conservative (protective) extremity of the median range determined in the Lewisville study. Any proposal for development that would cause the protection level to fall be-neath twenty-two acres per boat would automati-cally be rejected, but exceptions could be made on a case-by-case basis at the discretion of the

Park Ranger Justin Berndt at Lewisville Lake.

Operations and Real Estate Division chiefs. The policy applied not only to future development to be done by the District but also to any new wa-ter-related development proposed by concession-aires and other lessees. “The impact of this policy will vary from lake to lake,” Wells commented.

“The biggest impact will occur at lakes which cur-rently experience a high density of boating use.”16

Along with boating congestion on the lakes, the District had to contend with another related issue arising from Texas’s growing population and encroaching residential areas around its parks— that of off-road vehicle (ORV) use. Historically, the District had allowed recreational ORV use in designated areas at the lakes when there were no adjacent property owners who might be both-ered by the noise. However, new residents who had bought lakeside property near the parks quickly became annoyed at the OVRs and started complaining to their elected officials, who in turn asked the District to intervene. For example, in July 2001, the City of Lavon formally requested that the Fort Worth District close an ORV area at Lavon Lake because of citizen complaints. The seventy-acre riding area had opened in the mid- 1970s and was located in an old borrow pit where soil had been taken for use in the construction of the Lavon Dam. The District issued a public no-tice of the request, accepted comments from in-terested individuals and groups, and ultimately decided to permanently close the area, effective October 1, 2002.17

In another instance, the District was able to avoid taking such a drastic measure at Grape-vine Lake by sponsoring a one-day workshop attended by District representatives, several ORV groups, the Grapevine Lake Preservation Asso-ciation, the City of Flower Mound, and the Town of Trophy Club. The issue concerned the popu-lar, highly used ORV area at the 877-acre Marshall Creek Park, which the District had es-tablished in 1974 as an alternative for ORV en-thusiasts who were then riding in environmentally sensitive areas and prime wildlife habitat long the shores of Grapevine Lake. But as at Lavon, resi-dential encroachment resulted in more pro-nounced conflicts between users and adjacent landowners. During the workshop, the District recognized that ORV riding was a “legitimate rec-reational activity enjoyed by many individuals and groups,” and that “ORV areas are becoming scarce around the Dallas/Fort Worth area as more and more of the existing areas or facilities close down.” Consequently, after hearing all sides of the matter, the District then negotiated “reason-able operational rules and guidelines for ORV use in Marshall Creek Park consistent with federal, state, and local laws.” These included: 1) remov-ing the peninsula area/Marshall Creek Beach from ORV use and enclosing the remaining ORV area with pipe rail fencing; 2) controlling access to the park in such a way that allowed the man-aging agency to maintain an appropriate carry-ing capacity; 3) creating desired user features such as trails with differing difficulty levels and special features such as bowls, mud pits, and sand runs; and 4) monitoring use and perform-ing regular patrols to enforce rules and regula-tions. This approach worked for Grapevine, but the District found itself embroiled in other con-flicts both on the lakes and in the parks as the population of Texas kept climbing and new adja-cent property owners kept complaining. Each was handled on a case-by-case basis.18

Formerly Used Defense Site (FUDS) work likewise occupied Wells during his first two years as commander, with the District continuing to remediate several World War II vintage sites, of-ten with assistance from the Huntsville, Alabama, office, which was USACE’s center of expertise in removing old ordnance and explosives. Among the latest sites discovered was the 52,000-acre former Camp Swift in northeast Bastrop County, about twenty miles east of Austin. It was used as an Army training post from 1942 to 1947 and was now occupied by the Lower Colorado River Au-thority, Bastrop Lake State Park, Texas National Guard, a medium-security federal prison, and agricultural and residential lands.19

The 40,000-acre former Camp Maxey, located approximately ten miles north of Paris, was also a problem. It too was used for World War II Army training and was now occupied by Pat Mayse Lake, a wildlife management area, a Texas Na-tional Guard training site, and private lands. Old ordnance and explosives still remained at the 60,000-acre former Camp Howze northwest of Gainesville, which had reverted to private agri-cultural use with some residences established there, and needed immediate removal. The Dis-trict also had to deal with the former Navy Five Points Outlying Field, a dud-littered 1940s prac-tice bombing range that had become a heavily populated residential and business area now known as South Ridge Hills and Twin Parks Es-tates in Southeast Arlington. In August 2002, the District launched an ordnance investigation of old Camp Bowie, yet another former Army training area comprised of 122,000 acres, located in the southern part of Brown County and the northern part of Mills County.20

World War II ordnance was also turning up elsewhere. In one case, a farmer plowing his field in Palo Pinto County uncovered live hand grenades and ammunition. Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) experts from Fort Hood retrieved the ordnance, but the District knew that a lot more was still hidden or lost out in the countryside, rep-resenting a potentially life-threatening hazard for private citizens. FUDS therefore remained a high priority for the District.21

The District’s continuing flood control and risk management mission was an equally high civil works priority. In Texas, as Wells discovered, the climate was one of two extremes: years of droughts separated by periods of excessive rain and flash flooding. All the rivers and waterways within the District were susceptible, but the Trin-ity River basin in the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex was especially vulnerable. The original Dallas Floodway had been completed in 1932, and the District had rebuilt it in the 1950s, finishing work in May 1960 at a federal cost of $8.3 million. Flash flooding continued, however, and in the 1960s, local business interests prodded the District to include in its master plan the construction of a large, environment-altering canal to divert the water. Environmentalists vociferously opposed the proposal for a Trinity River and Tributaries Project, and a messy political and legal fight en-sued in the early 1970s. A 1973 federal court injunction barred the District from doing further work on it and any of its components, and a failed bond referendum effectively killed the canal.22

Meanwhile, a Dallas Floodway Extension (DFE) had been authorized by the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1965 (Public Law 89-298) for flood damage reduction in the Trinity River basin. Be-cause of the fallout from the failed canal project, the federal injunction, and vigilance from emboldened environmentalists, USACE made little effort to pursue the DFE until the 1980s. The

The former U.S.