Wallisville -The First Legal Battle
Saved by bald eagles
One of Jim’s first bay litigations involved the Wallisville Reservoir. The fight over constructing a dam where the Trinity River meets Trinity Bay had been raging since the early ‘70s. The dam was intended to create a reservoir that would be a companion freshwater source, along with Lake Livingston, to serve the booming population of Houston. Our crew shot what would have been lost by these moves, and what eventually replaced the dam in the Army Corp of Engineers plans.
The dam was first addressed by the Sierra Club, Houston Audubon, The Environmental Defense Fund, Houston Sportsman’s Club, and The Texas Shrimp Association to save 19,700 acres of swamps and wetlands and protect freshwater inflows into Trinity Bay.
An iniltilal injunction in 1973 successfully stopped the reservoir’s construction. But in 1979, a behind-the-scenes lobbying effort exempted the project from its environmental impact statement, and in 1986 it was all back in court, this time with Jim Balckburn involved with attorney Ray Berry as lead before Judge Bue.
The legal battles volleyed back and forth until the injunction against construction was lifted in 1987 by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. But just as everyone thought construction would begin, a glimmer of hope appeared in the form of two endangered Bald Eagles. They were nesting at Lake Charlotte, located in the heart of the project area.
With this discovery, Jim, now as lead attorney was able to delay construction again, and over a period of ten long years, the project evolved into building a saltwater barrier to manage the freshwater flows from Lake Livingston—which ironically was what the original reservoir had really been intended to do all along.
Current saltwater barrier.
