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Submerged Autos in Houston Bayous!
Jan 19, 2021 20:22:42   #
Robert J Samples Loc: Round Rock, Texas
 
Submerged Vehicles Discovered in Houston Bayous

The other night I had a dream that my sole job and occupation consisted of standing at the parking garage entrance of downtown buildings and listening to the people pulling into parking garages of tall buildings. I would listen to their automobile wheels for any unusual noise and grinding of their front wheel bearings, which would be due to their cars having been driven through high water resulting from flooded in Houston streets.

After hearing this till-tale grinding noise, I would approach the driver and solicit their business to remove and repair of their automobile wheels’ bad bearings and races before it became too late and the wheel froze up and causing an accident.

Since it is a regular occurrence in Houston to have flooded and even closing streets due either to torrential rains or even hurricanes, few are safe from the effects of flooding of their homes and cars. For all who are not coastal dwellers, you may not realize that you don’t have to take a direct hit from a hurricane. One can deliver heavy downpours if they pass several hundred miles on either side or you.

Then, I recalled an article in the Houston Chronicle of cars being sunk in the many bayous that crisscross the city. It was amazing that there were more than 20 recorded to have been located. So, my dream of repairs to cars driving through high waters was not as much one of nonsense as first thought but based on actual numbers. And some of these vehicles still had the bodies of their drivers still inside! Unless a resident of Houston is retired and just stays home during high water, they are forced to face the regular encounter of having to face high water regularly here in Bagdad on the Bayou!


What lies beneath: 127 cars in the bayous

Gabrielle Banks Oct. 20, 2015 Updated: Oct. 20, 2015 11:01 a.m.

EquuSearch founder Tim Miller (right) on a water search in 2009.
Photo: Mayra Beltran, Houston Chronicle
On the morning of on July 9, before the sun hit its baking point, Amy Dinn met a crew of like-minded souls at McGregor Park in southeast Houston. They unloaded canoes and kayaks, carted them down the concrete bank, and headed off to scout a paddling trail the city's parks department was considering for Brays Bayou.

The four-mile drift along brackish water to Mason Park covered a rarely explored urban waterway. Its banks are neither as manicured nor as celebrated as Buffalo Bayou, where art installations and bike trails abound. At McGregor, chainlink fencing, cut open in one spot by an eager intruder, separates the bayou from pedestrians.

In its final stretch to the Ship Channel, Brays Bayou is wider, and the water level remains deep year-round because it's part of the tidal basin. Deep enough to make things disappear.

This part of Brays has come to be known as a place mortal possessions are lost, forgotten or abandoned with impunity. While the banks offer freshly mowed grass, accented with an occasional Cheetos bag or discarded cigarillo pack, the underwater landscape conjures a post-apocalyptic wasteland, filled with sinister relics of urban life.

Dinn, an attorney who lives in Idylwood with her husband and two cats, serves on the board of the Bayou Preservation Association. She had joined the expedition that day to pinpoint obstacles that needed to be removed before boat launches are put in, so the paddling trail can be pitched as a destination for a broader audience.

The group's first discovery was impossible to miss: Hundreds of dead fish — some hefty, some petite, all malodorous — littered the murky surface for a half mile from McGregor Park down to Wayside. The paddlers discussed it, boat-to-boat: Something must have happened and changed the oxygen levels in the bayou. The scientists among them laid out likely scenarios for the fish kill.

Then, as they neared Spur 5, close to the University of Houston, something giant and white come into view beneath the surface. A Ford sedan? A Taurus, maybe. Yes, it looked like the tail end of a Ford was pointing upward, about a foot and a half, maybe two feet under the water. It looked like the car had gone headfirst toward the bottom of the bayou, leaving its rear bumper near the surface.

Dinn was not shocked, but she did feel a tinge of giddy excitement. She had followed news reports about dozens of cars marooned in Houston's bayous. In 2011, using sonar equipment along Brays, Sims and Buffalo Bayous, Texas EquuSearch had found 127 of them in a three-day effort, while searching for a single missing person whose body was found elsewhere.

She set down the paddle, letting the canoe drift gently toward the Gulf. On her mobile phone, she opened Houston's See Click Fix app and tapped out a report. There wasn't a "car in bayou" tab for complaints, so she clicked "other" and uploaded the GPS coordinates.

It may have been one of the cars EquuSearch documented. Or maybe not. Maybe someone had stolen it and left it here. Maybe someone had died in it. Dinn never found out. She never heard back from the city.

EQUUSEARCH FIRST began searching for missing persons on horseback in 2000. Since then, the group has located the bodies of 199 missing persons, using not just horses, but also cars, trucks, ATVs, drones, planes and helicopters — whatever it takes to get the job done.

Sometimes, that's boats. Last spring, Equusearch founder Tim Miller took City Councilman Michael Kubosh out in the group's 24-foot aluminum scully boat, to show him the dumped cars, and with his boat's motor, they hit something he hadn't seen. It was a car — but it wasn't just one car. The sonar showed one vehicle stacked on top of another, both under the water's surface.

In that same half-mile minefield of rebar and broken-up concrete, Miller had a worse scrape upstream. That was the day he and two Houston police officers went out on the vessel to search for an elderly man presumed to have drowned in the Memorial Day flood. They were cruising along the waterway, below the site where construction crews demolished the old Lidstone bridge, and his motor got tangled in a huge piece of carpet. And then in a portion of chain link fence. And then with concrete rebar. Then they hit a car.

The dams of discarded materials put a six-inch hole in the body of the boat. Miller spent $18,000 for a new motor and repairs to the hull.

Those who've navigated the tidal bayou water say a visitor may see all kinds of things — the detritus of urban life preserved in mud. Shopping carts, bicycles and barrels bloom up in the silt and trash has twisted itself into the branches of trees. Most of the stuff is uncharted.

The cars are the exception. EquuSearch got involved, mapping the underwater junkyard, after an 82-year-old Chase bank employee named Lillian High disappeared in October 2011. Her body was later found — along with her name badge from the bank — inside a rented Dodge Avenger that had fallen into a detention pond near her Houston home.

Miller, who is 68 and lives in Santa Fe, in Galveston County, rattles off the facts of the case of the missing bank employee: the date, the victim's age and bio, cause of death and length of time she was missing. He can do that for missing-persons cases all over the country.

He knows what it's like to lose someone. In 1984, his 16-year-old daughter disappeared. Not until 17 months later was her body discovered — and then, more or less by accident, in a spot in League City now known as the "killing field."
He started Texas Equusearch, thinking he'd spend a week or two, now and then, searching for the missing. He didn't know then how many missing people there would be, how much of his life it would consume. Equusearch works mostly in the Houston area, but also nationwide — as well as in places like Aruba, Sri Lanka, Mexico, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua.
Equusearch has recovered a number of vehicles with bodies inside. Once they located an airplane with three bodies in the middle of Lake Erie.
They have also found vehicles that provided evidence in homicides, such as the case of 19-year-old Jodi Sanderholm. Investigators traced a single hair recovered from a car dumped in a lake near Arkansas City, Kan., to the man sentenced to death for her murder.
Every car in the bayou is a potential crime scene. It could be a homicide, suicide or an accident. An empty car could have been stolen or dumped to collect insurance money. Miller has been making a case to get these cars out of the water before they drag someone under and create another disaster.
This month officials in the halls of local government made a plan to do something about those underwater crime scenes. On Wednesday, the city approved a joint pilot project with Harris County to begin pulling cars out of the bayous.

It's a pilot project: The initial appropriation of $40,000 will test what takes to get the cars out, preserve them as intact crime scenes for investigation and contain any environmental impact that results from trying to extract them.

Miller doesn't think that pilot project is nearly enough. "We are the Bayou City," he says. "Millions of dollars are spent on the banks of the bayous to clean it up and make it beautiful, but what's in the bottom of the bayous is a total disgrace to the city."

He doesn't want anything to do with the extraction at the $40,000 level. Between the barges, cranes, air jets and professional divers needed to do the job, he estimated it would take $500,000 to get the project up and running.

But that's how government works, Mike Talbott, head of the Harris County Flood Control District, says. You need to assess what elements are needed before you ask for bids.
Miller has no patience for assessing elements, asking for bids — never mind that many of those cars have likely been underwater for decades.

"It's an embarrassment. It's disgusting," he said. "If I had to go at that pace, three-quarters of the people we've found would still be missing."There may have been people inside those cars. There may be families who want to know where they are. Just Sayin…RJS

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Jan 20, 2021 08:36:59   #
dbed Loc: POMME DE TERRE LAKE MISSOURI
 
at gov't levels more money is spent on assessing a problem than is spent to fix it also more time

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Jan 20, 2021 12:01:39   #
Iowa Farmer Loc: Iowa City Iowa
 
Interesting, Robert. When the river was very low here a couple of years ago, they found a car with a missing person that had been there 15 years.

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