News flash: this just in — The Trinity River contains pollutants.
I know, right? Some surprise.
Serious, though, the Department of State Health Services issued a toxin warning Wednesday that stretches from “the Clear Fork of the Trinity River from the Benbrook Reservoir Dam, and the West Fork from the Lake Worth Dam, through the main stem of the river downstream to the U.S. Highway 287 bridge on the Freestone-Anderson county line.”
That includes Tarrant, Dallas, Ellis, Kaufman, Henderson, Navarro, Freestone and Anderson counties.
Testing found fish with high levels of dioxins and polychlorinated byphenyls, or PCBs, and that stuff could cause cancer among other unnamed maladies that would spark a public panic if publicized.
Swimming, though, is perfectly OK by the DSHS folks, who evidently have never seen the Trinity or smelled it near downtown Dallas. About the only people I can think of who’d swim there are those who end up sleeping with the fishes, and now we’ve come full circle.
Bruce Felps owns and operates East Dallas Times, an online community news outlet serving the White Rock Lake area. This concludes our "no sh... duh" portion of the program.
