Living with the Trinity on KERA

Photo By Luther Smith

DALLAS/FORT WORTH – In connection with the 40th anniversary of the nation’s first Earth Day celebration in April of 1970, a documentary about an important environmental battle in Texas will be broadcast on Texas public television stations statewide. KERA-TV’s Living with the Trinity explores the conflict that developed in the early 1970s over plans to transform the entire length of the Trinity River into a barge canal linking Dallas and Fort Worth to the Gulf of Mexico. The controversy placed Texas in the national spotlight and spawned a lawsuit against a proposed dam at the mouth of the river near Houston that signaled a new era in environmental politics. The fate of the Trinity River was ultimately decided by a vote.

Living with the Trinity explores this fascinating chapter in the river’s political history. The one-hour program airs on public television stations statewide in April and May. Please check local listings. Living with the Trinity airs Tuesday, April 20, 2010, at 8:00 p.m. on KERA-TV and rebroadcasts Wednesday, April 21 at 10:00 p.m. 

Living with the Trinity is featured on a related Web site at www.TrinityRiverTexas.org. In conjunction with the statewide broadcast of the documentary, new videos, photographs and archival film footage will be added to the Web site to update three major multimedia stories focusing on the river’s history, flood prevention efforts and the latest developments regarding the environmental quality of the river. Visitors can access educational materials, explore the geography, ecology and cultural history of the river, and find new opportunities to participate in the public discussions regarding Trinity River redevelopment projects planned for Fort Worth and Dallas. Additionally, KERA will update its ongoing radio series Banking on the Trinity. The reports will air Tuesday, April 13 to Thursday, April 15 during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on KERA-FM.

The television documentary, Living with the Trinity, revisits the period from 1965 to 1973 when U.S. Congressman Jim Wright of Fort Worth, working with the Johnson Administration, was able to win Congressional approval of nearly $1 billion for what would become a highly controversial project. Seventeen counties in the river basin voted on a bond issue to supplement the federal funding. The bond issue failed by just 20,000 votes and the barge canal was never built.

“The most powerful people in Texas wanted the project to succeed,” says KERA’s Executive Producer and Project Director Rob Tranchin. “Why they wanted the canal and how they were defeated constitute an amazing chapter in Texas environmental history.”

Living with the Trinity includes interviews with former Fort Worth Congressman, U.S. Speaker of the House and canal proponent, Jim Wright, and Dallas businessman and former U.S. Congressman, Alan Steelman, who unseated four-term Congressman Earle Cabell in the 1972 election and rallied opposition to the project. Fort Worth Star-Telegram Columnist Bob Ray Sanders and Lee Cullum, host of KERA’s business program CEO, offer insight from their perspectives as reporters who covered these issues for KERA-TV.