QUICKSAND: TEXAS TOLL ROADS COULD COLLAPSE BEFORE THEY ARE PAID FOR

Jack Blood.com | February 17, 2006
By Jack Blood

A funny thing happened on the way to Grandmother’s house… Lil Red Riding hood had to pay 17 cents a mile collected as a government tribute by an innocuous toll booth slave denying her access to the continuing “freeway” at a few bucks a pop. Little red riding hood was tracked, traced, data based, and likely searched by Toll Gestapo’s, and what was left of Lil Red was documented, and spit out of the surveillance mill for future reference!

She made it to see grandma, but had to give up her picnic basket to highway robbery.

When she made it to grandma's house it was Gone. Grandma had been hauled off to a Halliburton camp, and her property seized by eminent domain: IE: there was a toll booth where grandma’s house used to be. 4.00 Please.

… What big teeth you have Grandma..

And you thought flying was intrusive?

In New Hampshire- Electronic toll payments, known as E-Z Pass, will arrive later this spring. You’ll buy a transponder that, affixed to your windshield, will be read by a tollbooth scanner. An appropriate amount of money will be electronically deducted from your revolving account. No more dirty dollar bills or grimy tokens changing hands.

This system is being used in Texas already.

What’s worse is that foreign and multi-national privateers are snatching up failed infrastructure, and resources all over the US.

Foreign investors see stability in highways?

Companies are motivated by slow but steady payoffs that long-term deals to run U.S. roads offer. When foreign investors feast their eyes on America, they see plenty of potential investments, from businesses to farms to huge amounts of debt.

But interstate highways?

Absolutely, say Australia's Macquarie Bank and Spain's Cintra -- the international partners in the deal to run the Indiana Toll Road -- who view themselves as mavericks in the relatively new world of buying into the privatization of American highways.

The team has previously joined forces to buy the 7.8-mile Chicago Skyway and to plan, build and operate a new Texas toll road, in addition to several other similar projects around the globe.

Their motivation: long-term deals that promise to pay off for investors -- slowly but surely -- the way utility companies provided stability to this generation's parents and grandparents.

Maybe these international “investors’ would like to know what I have been hearing lately from my sources inside the construction of the Trans Texas Corridor. When they hear what I have to say, they may not be so anxious to close the deal.

A year ago now I met an inspector of the Trans Texas Corridor (TTC). Though he was a young man he had risen to a management position with a company contracted to certify the construction done on the roads. He began to tell me some odd, off the record stories beginning with a number of deaths that had strangely not been reported in the local media. I assume that this is par for the course when building highways, but knowing as I did how controversial the pending toll roads in Austin, TX were, I thought it strange that I never heard one peep about this, Ever. The deaths were accidental and concerned Illegal immigrants hired on as cheap labor. I would later see a trend. Stop at nothing to stay under budget, and ahead of schedule. This is the TXDOT mantra, and it seems nothing will get in their way.

My source again came to me “off the record” and told me of a kickback scheme involving his company, which lead to the company president being fired for embezzlement. Again. Nothing in the papers, or nothing ever revealed in the CAMPO, TXDOT meetings we have attended. But he had no reason to lie, and I believed him. Moving on…

The next tidbit I received was that the Military was building a super highway of their own, and was taking bids. This I am told is to run parallel to the Corridor from san Antonio to Dallas, and would be a military only super wide highway. I thought of the fact that Adolph Hitler did this the moment he took power. He knew that he would go to war, and would need these superhighways to move his machinery to the front.

Also, some of you might be interested that there is a giant TUNNEL under much of the Trans Texas Corridor big enough to drive cars through. Nobody working with the above ground project seems to know why it is there. My Source has been inside of it, and thought it was all rather mysterious. No Kidding. We have heard many reports of underground structures all over the world. Tokyo, London, Denver, DC…Not to mention the gargantuan super collider project which was “abandoned” to the military after the original project lost congressional funding. One has to ask; what’s with the tunnels?

Still all of this went off the record, and I respected my source by never uttering a word of it to anyone, even though I was active in the Anti – Toll community, and had done many radio shows on the subject with local and national organizers.

Then, two weeks ago I received a call from my source. He was panicked, and began telling me something that I automatically knew was a nuclear info bomb. He had been failing tests for the corridor he was working on, and inspecting for the last year. After repeated attempts to have these failures corrected, by both himself and his immediate supervisor, and after seeing fellow inspectors threatened and fired… He had had enough.

You see TXDOT has absolutely no intention of building these freeways up to code. They are millions of dollars under budget, and that seems to be the only code they are meeting.

My source had initially wanted to come out as a whistleblower, but fearing for his life and his future (He would be blackballed in the industry) he has since had a change of heart. Better yet, he has leaked me many documents to prove what he had told me, and is still inside to continue to give me information.

As far as I can tell, what the documents prove so far, is that:

• The Crushed Limestone used to make the concrete of which the roads are to be built with is weak. Tests done by contactors / manufacturers are rushed through.

I am told that MLA labs, for example will skip the 4 th and final test if the product passes the first three tests.

Translation: These roads will fall apart long before they are paid for, and could

take innocent drivers with them. This has apparently been covered up not only by

TXDOT and their contractors, but is being certified out the door by the very

Contractors there to make sure we never get to this point.

• Charts done by my source and other inspectors show that the standing infrastructure is failing right from the beginning. “Decantation tests.” A 5.1 – 8% loss in concrete integrity over just the last few months. This seems to be caused by the initial testing, or lack of testing, of the Sieve quality. (Sieve refers to the rock that makes up the concrete.) In fact my source told me that he was told to inspect around the #4 Sieve (The bigger rocks) because they would not pass, and therefore not be usable in the project. He would eliminate them from the test, but they are used in the end product. He also said that it wouldn’t matter if the test failed anyway, and the testing itself is just a formality. The sieve goes out before the tests are even done, and subsequently used on the roads. No matter how bad it is, it’s just too late. Can you imagine what this concrete will look like in a few years when the job is completed? If it is completed.

• In documents reflecting the number of tests needed for August – October 2005, we found that on the SH 130 Turnpike project alone, the tests performed versus the tests REQUIRED by law were far less than required. The “Required” figures also do not meet the standard. So even if the inspectors ran the required tests on any given material, or structure… It wouldn’t matter because they still are not running the number of tests needed to satisfy state code. It seems like TXDOT doesn’t care, and I suspect that they are confident that they wouldn’t get caught. So much for that now.

• Tests on the concrete failed consistently on: The Hanson aggregate freeways, the Burnett Grade 2 aggregate, the RTI Georgetown aggregate, Capitol Bolm Road, the Travis aggregate, TXI Green Plant, and the SH 130 Turnpike in general. I am told that this only represents 50% of the total sections we know have been affected. The list also denotes the company responsible for the freeway and it’s location in the project.

When testing is done, the results are entered into “Elvis”

Elvis is the super database which is privately kept to catalog the project.

When an inspector enters a failure into to Elvis, he is done with the job. The job failed, and he

knows to move on. He is told to “#2 stamp” the test, which means to approve it even though it had

failed. We have to assume that no more tests will be done, and the offending test will be buried,

while the project is certified.

• “Dry Density tests” are soil tests to make sure that the soil under the freeway structure isn’t “Quick sand”. On the charts we have in our possession, the curve shows that the Dry Density Test met with a maximum percentage of 126.27. I am told that it needs to be closer to 270.00. The inspectors will again “#2 Stamp” the approval and move on, with the soil test coming in under 50%.

In other words, the ground holding up the freeways may not be dense enough to hold up the load.

Thus, sinking, and buckling freeways will be the result.

Minimally, we need some kind of oversight beyond the authority of TXDOT and CAMPO to straighten this out. I am horrified to think that we will pay through the nose for these giant control grids that are likely to fall apart as we are driving on them.

The Bechtel “BIG DIG” comes to mind here as an example of what can happen to a city under the ether of extortion, and bribery. That project is still falling apart even after coming in 10’s of billions over budget. It stands as a piece of crap, and a joke to Bostonians everywhere. Will we let that happen here in TX? Should we assume that if this is happening here, it is happening everywhere? The gift that keeps on giving to contractors and politicos alike.

Gov. Rick Perry, creator of the Trans-Texas Corridor, calls it a "visionary transportation plan" that could become a national model. Perry touts it as the USA's most ambitious transportation project since President Dwight Eisenhower and Congress launched the interstate highway system in 1956. It is Governor Perry’s poor leadership that has led us down this crumbling road.

"It's a money-grab," said Collin County (S.H. 121, North Texas Tollway) Judge Ron Harris. "We're really going to have to follow the lead of our legislative delegation because this has kind of gone over what we can do."

David Stall founded Corridor Watch to monitor the project and says it has "hundreds and hundreds" of members in 133 of Texas' 254 counties. "It's not being taken on as a transportation project, it's a revenue scheme," he says. The state can condemn private land for the corridor, then sell or lease it to private businesses such as gas stations or restaurants. "There was no traffic study that says any community was clamoring for a project like TTC."

Because of its location, Texas is integral to the creation of the FTAA and the eventual merger of North and South America under a single regional government like the EU.

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