A mother and child drowned in a Fort Worth culvert. Here’s why accountability is vital

Acts of God and mankind are not always distinguishable. They are often hopelessly intertwined.

This may be one of those times.

Following the tragic drowning of a young mother and her 2-year-old daughter here after their car was swept into a gushing culvert during a deluge Sept. 8, a Star-Telegram investigation has unearthed the fact that engineers had long before flagged the area as a drainage hazard.

Nothing was done about it.

That day’s rain — 5 to 6 inches in the area in question within two to three hours, the National Weather Service reported — qualifies as a 50-year rainfall, likely to happen only once in 50 years, a stormwater manager with the city of Fort Worth wrote in an email to a colleague.

Sure seems so. Area emergency responders reported 50 high-water rescues that day. Only a mile away and an hour removed from the double drowning of Jessica Romero, 18, and her 2-year-old daughter Llaylanii, 69-year-old Eddy Volpp drowned after his car was carried off South Cravens Road.

Yet, only a week later a pickup truck was swept into the same culvert as Romero and her daughter, with that driver thankfully surviving. But another 50-year rain just a week later? Seems rather unlikely, as does Texas Department of Transportation spokesman Val Lopez’s assertion that, “The issue is not adequate drainage. The issue is rainfall.”

On the contrary, this tragedy involves a great many issues. The main one is inadequate drainage.

Another central, haunting issue is the fact that engineering consultants hired by the city of Fort Worth cited the culvert as a drainage hazard back in 2016. Sometime between 2001 and 2005, it had been filled in, and a drainage pipe installed by someone — apparently with nary a permit. The consultants warned city officials in their 2016 report that the pipe was inadequate to drain water from East Loop 820 South into Lake Arlington,

In a fateful and complicated confluence of heedlessness, the city determined that the drainage problem noted by its consultants, and their suggested improvements, weren’t the city’s responsibility — and that the drainage problem there was “not exceptional” and hadn’t inspired a history of complaints.

Making matters more convoluted is that the culvert has had several owners and is the subject of multiple easements.

The easements included one by the Texas Department of Transportation — but the city of Fort Worth didn’t notify TxDOT of the 2016 warning until after this September’s drownings of Romero and her daughter.

We can’t imagine the sorrow gripping their family and friends this holiday season. But perhaps officials should at least try imagining it, before they issue blanket warnings about driving into high water — as if this was all the young mother’s fault — and after the multi-party failure to keep this mother and child as safe as possible.

We absolutely agree this tragedy should serve as a reminder for motorists never to test the depth or fury of flood waters. Nothing could be a better legacy for this mother and daughter.

Still, among the many errors leading up to this fateful encounter, Jessica Romero’s seems the least egregious.

This story was originally published December 26, 2018 at 9:24 AM.