Naked City

Murphy's Law – if anything can go wrong, it will – seems to have bedeviled a western Travis Co. residential development. West Cypress Hills, a master-planned community of 800 homes, was ordered to shut down construction last week after Lower Colorado River Authority inspectors spotted a completely nonfunctioning riser pipe (a sediment filtering device) in a storm-water detention pond. The vertical pipe was supposed to be filtering sediment eroded into the pond by construction activities to prevent further pollution of Lick Creek.

The problem-plagued pond has been a source of trouble for the creek and its downstream residents for the last 10 months. After LCRA officials visited the site last week and saw the faulty riser pipe, Tom Hegemier, a water resources engineer with the LCRA, notified the project engineer, Ed Moore, in a June 17 letter and followed up the next day with a stop-work order that extended to the entire construction site. Hegemier said he saw substantial improvement when he returned to the site on Monday – hydromulch had been sprayed on the pond area to jump-start the vegetation process, and a new, improved riser pipe was ready for installment – but this was the second stop-work order issued in three months; the first applied only to the detention pond. The latest order demands the cessation of any activity that would disturb dirt, and will remain in place until the filtration system is functioning properly and a bypass pipe installed to redirect creek water around the pond.

"If we have good weather we can finish the repair work within two weeks at the most," said Moore. "We've had far more than the average amount of rainfall this year, so we've had a real tough time revegetating [the pond], which will help to stabilize it."

Last summer, Lick Creek residents watched as the waterway, which runs into the Pedernales River near the far end of Lake Travis, turned from crystal clear to murky brown shortly after the detention pond and dam were constructed on the creek. The water in the creek's east branch has yet to clear, and the collapsed riser pipe likely didn't help matters. Downstream residents say they fear the damage is permanent and have issued developer Russell Parker a notice of intent to sue under the Clean Water Act. If state and federal environmental agencies don't bring enforcement action against Parker by some time in August, the residents said they would take matters into their own hands with a federal lawsuit.