DAVID SCHWEERS
March 25, 2008
San Antonio, Texas
Martha Doty Freeman, Interviewer
This is Martha Doty Freeman. The date is March 25111
, 2008. I'm going to be interviewing
David Schweers as part of the San Antonio River Authority Oral History Project Phase II
The interview is taking place in San Antonio.
If I could get you to start off with some background information.
Well, I was born in San Antonio, and my ancestors have been in farming and ranching for -
since about 1848. Most of my ancestors come from Medina County, so I'm very interested
in water issues with agriculture. I was raised during the drought of the) 50s, and I can attest
to the value of water. It's a very meaningful subject to me because I've seen livestock and
wildlife perish from a drought, and it gives you insight into how things really work.
Sounds as if you have a lot in common with the previous manager, general manager who was
from Medina County and had the same experience growing up.
Yes, uh-huh. And I went to parochial schools all my life. I went through Central Catholic
and went through two years at St. Mary's, and I've got a background in management
~g_- ~
~ course that the city sponsored, St. Phillips and various and sundry technical
I
classes at SAC.
1
So if it was going to be a subsurface tunnel, why was surface - why was deed research
involving surface necessary?
It has to do with the way our society developed, and you have to think of the vast oilfield
operations that have been in this state. It's colored our thinking so that we own the surface to
the center of the earth, and that is a deeply engrained tradition. So we had to work with that.
Even though we had only a subterranean easement, the easement doesn't come to the surface;
it's not a surface easement. We still had to treat it as if it were because of that tradition. We
~~~~
had to go back and try to reconstruct San Antonio from. onward, and that was rea'r!y a
pleasant experience.
Were there any particular tracts that stand out in your mind as being of unusual interest or
that were particularly difficult to research?
Well, the history ofthe river itself is unique because the f'ing of Spain granted three leagues
* to the f ity under the Spanish government, and that was carried over and carried into l exas
law, present law. And it made a unique situation here. The way the river has been moved
and the way it supported - and actually it was the birth of our community. And it was, like I
say, a colorful challenge. You find some - the history of some very interesting characters
here and there, and San Antonio has an unusually high amount of colorful characters. The
border areas of any country attract adventurers and some that weren't so colorful. So it
makes for a very interesting mix.
3
Doing the deed research there, we found in the county records that the county record books
had been damaged in the flood of 1921, particularly pertaining to the area there on North
Flores Street at the Five Points intersection, and that was a very old part of town. That was a
rendezvous point on the old wagon road to Chihuahua, and before that, it was the starting
point to the Mission San Saba. The deeds there, they reflected ~erent - the San Pedro
Creek had been moved in the 1870s, and some ofthose records were so blurred that all these
ownerships were clouded, and the city map actually showed a blank there. So we had to take
the books from the county and photograph them with several different cameras to bring all
the text back to life. And then we found the deeds, and we put together the properties as they
should have been.
I had lawyers from an estate - they were lawyers that were located in Houston that were
handling an estate of one of the properties there. And after we reestablished the property,
they had less, much less than they had fenced. What they wanted, they wanted to know if
they could get a rebate from the taxes; obviously not. But restructuring that part of town was
interesting.
The history in the Five Points project, we demolished the old brick building there; it
wd\
belonged to Jacob Wilforth (phonetic), and that was built in the 1870s. And we got to read
the history about that; that was quite the interesting history. That was one of the first brick
buildings in San Antonio, and it was right there, like I say, at the junction of the Chihuahua
~ad, and that was used until the 1920s. So our trade with northern Mexico was greater than
northern Mexico's trade with Mexico City. And it all went through San Antonio.
5
about this very carefully because the springs had been campgrounds for Indians for long
before the white man~ere, and they thought thefround a treasure. And I
deflated their whole program.
What happened?
In 1953, I was in the Boy Scouts, and we had a tremendous Jamboree right there in the park.
We had little pit fires all over that park. And I - I asked Mr. Cox to step aside"and I told him
4-r1N ~ event. .and I went to lunch, and when I came back, everybody was gone.
(Laughing.)
Some of these events are pretty entertaining.
So you came here at the beginning of the period when there was expansion within the River
Authority.
Yeah. There was an aggressive program here. We built the marina, we rebuilt Gate 4,
remodeled Gate 3, and we did the j4etterments projects here on the river. We built a couple
of sewer plants. We built the 19th Street ~am out there on the west side. We redid the
operators at Olmos Dam, and Steve Ramsey was the project manager for the Clearwater
project where they put in the ~Anthony Falls spillway on the dam.
7
stored, they can be maintained, they can be hauled out and painted and everything. They
have a shop fo:t:all motor repairs, and they even have a conversion unit now that liquefies
A.
natural gas so that the motors on the river don't have any offensive exhausts.. You don't smell
any engine exhaust on the river, so it's very clean burning.
Was that a project that was contracted out to a particular builder or contracting firm?
It wa)Michael Construction Company was our contractor. We administered the contract and
provided the inspection and testing. Unfortunately, they were a very, I guess, honest
contractor, and they had a problem with an out-of-state contract. And when they were about
95 percent complete with this project, they went bankrupt, and that clouded the issue. The
bonding company is forced to hire a contractor to come in, and they did, and they finished
the job, and everything worked once.
~t-{ti
And then ~ad to go back in, Eddie~ (phonetic) and I spent four months tracing out
all the electrical circuits there. When the bonding company's contractor came in, they used
~
jumper circuits to make everything work, and they used blue wire to do that. So when Eddie
and I examined the circuits and we found blue wire, we knew where the problems were, so it
took us quite a while. And we did an as-built for the electrical engineer and resolved all these
lSSUeS.
So what is the /uthority 's recourse in a situation like that, where the bonding company's
substitute doesn 't actually perform as it should?
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the, ity for the first Gate 4.
I want to get back to specific projects, but I wondered just from something you said. What
were the differences between working for thtty and working for the River Authority?
there a different culture?
Well, I stayed wet a lot.
(Laughing.)
Can you be more specific?
Was
It has to do with administrations, and when I worked for th0ty, McAllister was one of the
mayors, Becker was one of the mayors, and they ran th;City like a well-organized business.
And Mr. Pfeiffer was the director here, and he was of the same mindset. So there were a lot
of similarities because of the mindset of the management of that period. They were not
flamboyant; they were very businesslike, and they were interested in execUting the projects,
get them out the door. And that was a common themefty and RiV'er Authority at that time
period.
So it sounds as if Fred Pfeiffer probably tended that kind of stability for a long time whereas
with the tity, it might have been in that mode during one administration but something
entirely different at another time.
11
What was the reason for that?
Tainter gates, in San Antonio because of the drain and flow of the river, th~er gate had
a problem with leakage. If debris collected on the seat of the gate, the gate wouldn't make a
good seal. So that was - ~st something in the design. On a big reservoir, you don't have
that problem. The debris is held at the back of the reservoir by gravity and the flow
characteristics and all that. So when you put it in a river like that, almost anything will break
the seal and water will spray out.
So what was the new design that -
The leaf gate. The leaf gate is hinged on the flow line of the river. It pivots on the hinge
that's in the bottom of the river, and it just lays down. It's got a mechanical unit that raises it
and lowers it. It is laid completely flat during a flood, so theoretically, everything is washed
over it. Wit's - as far as its operation, for an area like the River Loop downtown, it's much
more efficient than ~inter gate.
But don't you loose your control capacities in a flood, then, with that kind of system?
We had automated systems to control the floodgate, and it would sense the water surface rise,
and it would begin to come down automatically. And the park rangers are on duty 24 hours a
day. They are the human backup in case there's a mechanical or electrical failure.
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rain started. At 9 o'clock, the intensity of the rain was great. I went to work; I spent the next
,J..-
three days soaking wet. And we got to the tunnel intake - we had nine inches of rain by 10
o'clock in the morning, and a huge volume of debris had overwhelmed the tunnel structure.
So the crew was at work trying to put the trash racks into - back into place. We had this
tremendous amount of debris we were removing with a bobcat and a dump truck and all.
~
And we had opened up the lower door to have some ventilation ¥all - we had issues with all
kinds of equipment because of the flows of water were just really something we really had to
struggle to contain.
At 4 o'clock in the evening, there was another nine inches of rain fell suddenly in Alamo
Heights. And this wall of water came down Broadway carrying a few jumpsters. It was
quite spectacular. I go to St. Peter's €burch. One of my daughter's friends had a wedding
planned for 200 people. There was eight feet of water out in front of the church, so let's say
t:~
the reception was a - there were 20 people at the reception.
But anyway, this wall of water covered the entire golf course from the McAllister Freeway to
Avenue A, and it surrounded the tunnel completely; it filled up the inside, filled up
everything. The water - excess flow went past the tunnel to Newell Street, and it entered the
channel at Newell Street so that at the height of the flood at about 5:00 p.m., people were still
drinking margaritas at Casa Rio, whereas in 1921 they would have been under eight feet of
water.
So the tunnel paid for itself four months after it was cleared. And it 2002, I was retired at the
15
Texas and -
(End ofTape 1, Side A, start of Side B.)
- it was a 70,000-acre ranch on the Rio Grande at Carrizo Springs, the Farias Ranch, and it
was probably surveyed before 1800. And a group of investors bought it and were going to
~
subdivide it, and he was (~) re-cover the boundaries of a piece of land as - these
thousands of acres that had been laid out with a knotted lariat. And the guy had probably
lubricated himself with a little tequila on the side. So to say that boundaries were uncertain
would be an understatement. And you have to go back and go through and piece all this back
together, and that's what he was good at.
They did find one of the comers that had been put there, a pile of stones that the surveyor had
s
put out there in 1800 or 1790. Well, the Indians - the old archives and survey.or'- the
archives of Texas and all, they would count all these field notes of these surveyors that
surveyed for the State of Texas, and they had difficulty in West Texas with the Indians there.
Some of the surveys were not done on foot because they - it wouldn't have been completed
anyway, so they did the best they could.
It's those office surveys that we all struggle with subsequently.
And they really get cloudy when somebody drills an oil well, that's when the panic hits.
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(Laughing.) Can you explain that a little further?
All right. We had- at that time, the TNRCC, which is now the TCEQ or whatever, but
anyway, they were in charge of the remediation, and we had environmental engineers on site.
And the material was logged as it was taken from the ground, and it was put into trucks, and
each truck was assigned a number, and the manifests are issued. So you have a chain of
custody of contaminated soil. So my name is on the ticket that started out, so it's mine.
Anyway, there was a site that was set aside ae Gardens for the disposition of this
contaminated material, and it was - we dug there for about a year. And the problem was we
had a water main break, and the water picked up the contaminate, which is pretty visible; it's
green. So we had - in the oilfield, you have these odd-shaped tanks that are tapered; we call
them frac tanks. We had one of those sitting up there at Fredericksburg Road pumping this
water into the tank because that has to be taken to East Texas and pumped down into one of
the salt domes.
So there has to be a considerable expense that's involved on top ofwhat the River Authority
would have estimated as the cost for the Five Points project. How does that get covered?
I'm not sure how the Superfund is distributed by the federal government, but I think in this
case, maybe, the city was the agent that dealt with the government on that issue. I'm not sure.
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planning out in advance to try and replace the earlier infrastructure?
There was an effort to replace the infrastructure, but the - a question of safety, like I said,
you had this drowning, and we had the loss of 51 people in the flood of 1921, and it just -
these two elements worked together, I guess, to push society to get these projects done.
(Recording turned off and turned back on.)
You also mentioned thf tterments project on the river. Were the gate replacements in the
marina part of that?
Well, th~etterments - actually, the Corps ofEngineers did the main channel work out here.
The river's been straightened and restraightened and moved since 1900, and the Corps put
this channel in, the channel that you see out here. And they left just stark banks. There were
no amenities, no shrubbery, no sidewalks, nothing. And that's what our portion was, the
betterments. We put in the sidewalks and all the amenities, the walls and the sprinkler
systems and all of the trees that you see, we put those in. And that's basically what the
j etterments were.
And what was your involvement with that?
I was an inspector. But the most interesting thing was at the end of the job, I got to go count
all the plants. We had 752 star jasmine, 362 Indian 6 We eve~~~
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go up and down the sidewalk.
Where did the initiative come from for thatjetterment project - or actually I was thinking
for the auditorium project?
u.rtW
Well, the auditorium burned, and at that time, there ~major reconstruction there. It was
kind of I guess an opportune time to work on the river at the same time. The contractor that
redid the auditorium built this building.
But anyway, we were working side-by-side, two contractors, one working on the river and
another working on the auditorium. And it was so tight an area tfat we had machines with
their outriggers interlocked. And the operator would look at the other operator, and they
would signal, and he would move his boom, and then he would look at the other operator and
he'd move his boom. So it was coordination through the contractors; there was no conflict.
They were kind of old guys, they got along, they just did the job.
So who was the contractor?
Houston Bridge.
Houston Bridga,~e they local?
No. They did some jobs in San Antonio, but they - I think the partnership has since divided
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feet of surface to flow over. It doesn't matter to water if it's a straight wall or a zigzag wall.
So we didn't have room for the straight wall, so we crunched it. It looks like an accordion
yow kiR6!£just scrunched together.
So it creates more surface?
Yeah. And it performed well through the '98 flood. It's completely static; it doesn't move.
Does it have a tendency to collect more debris, though?
Tires, but that's the neighborhood.
(Laughing.)
The environment, let's call it the environment.
What do you do with all the debris in a flood situation like that?
Generally, several months after the flood recedes, the cleanup starts. It starts immediately~
~on the streets, and then it works its way down the channels. And it's a city-wide effort
or county-wide effort because you never know what you're going to fmd. We found a camel
saddle on the grates at Olmos Dam.
25
(Laughing.)
The devil made me do it.
How did the trash- were they called trash racks?
Yes.
How did those work?
They have electric motors that drive these cog - big, the cogs are about two feet in diameter.
And the chain has links that are like a foot long or so, so it's like a big bicycle chain. And
'
they tum, and they have cross - they run in pairs, so there are cross pieces on th~- connect
this chain, and they pick up things that come up against the screens. They're at an angle so
they can pull them up to the deck, and they' ll drop them on the deck.
And where is the deck?
It's about 18 feet above the river. And what we have there, we have a bay at the end, and a
dump truck can drive below it. And we can take @?beat - there's only room for @cat
to work, and it' ll push the debris into the dump truck, and we can haul it away that way. Not
everything makes it to the top because of the structure, the supporting structure; a 30-foot
pecan tree won't make it to the top. We get a few of those from time to time.
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Yes.
So what part of- were there some other subsequent parts of that project that you
participated in?
Yes. Olmos Dam had gate operators that were set on a low bay below the top of the dam,
and there was a roadway on the top of the dam. When the dam was modified - Congressman
Gonzales was the major factor in getting the money for the dam's rebuilding. What the
problem is with the dam, it would have been a disaster in the '98 flood if it hadn't been
I
modified. The dam is a rectangular section across that gap between Alamo Heights and
Terrell Hills, the Olmos ~~ey have - they had six gates.
sf#
And if a flood of the volume of the '98 flood had occurred, the gates would not accommodate
vt-the
flow. The water would have gone over the top. So if you ha,i'water falling over this dam,
it has tremendous energy. It would have undermined the soil at a great depth on the down
side - downstream side of the dam. And the possibility of failure was great, substantial.
What the River Authority's project did, they dynamited off the top of the dam, and they put
in this huge spillway. It's called a St. Anthony Falls configuration. It's got this double curve;
it's buried, the curve is buried in the landscape. But what it does, it diverts this overflow
downward, and it causes the water to roll back on itself to dissipate the energy so it doesn't
just tear out great gaping holes. They put in a series
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would it have been done by engineering firms that the River Authority contracted to?
We might have done some of the structural, and we have an engineer, electrical engineer
that's been, I guess, a consultant for years and years, Frank Dillard. And he would handle
the electrical portions of it, and a lot of the structural would come out of this office.
So how did the structure respond in '98? How high did the water get in the basin?
It came within three feet of going over the spillway. And one of the city managers - director
of public works was fired over the operation of the dam before I came on board. And the
Highway Department - the McAllister Freeway had a lot of problems. There was a lot of
controversy, it was delayed for 10 years because of environmental concerns and all of that.
So by the time it was actually contracted out, construction prices and labor prices had
escalated, so they barely had eno~h money to build it out to 410 out to San Pedro. So they
built the section up there by the quarry,i(s below the spillway level of Olmos Dam, and that
,;-..J
is a problem.
In the flood that preceded the '98 flood, the jity did not want to block the McAllister
Freeway, so they opened the floodgates, and they flooded out the River Road neighborhood.
And that was a real problem. They were desperate to aid those people, and they sent in some
of the bigger fire trucks. And coming in from St. Mary Street, those streets in the River Road
area have high retaining walls, and they're very narrow. These trucks couldn't make a turn;
they couldn't even get in there to get these people out, and it was quite a crisis. And the
31
during the ~Os?
Well, we built a few piers, and we put in tri-lock shoreline protection.
What 's that?
Tri-lock, it looks like a concrete grass burr, and they interlock. And they put it on areas
where you had low flows but eroding soil conditions. And you put a fabric underneath them,
a filter fabric, and you put this tri-lock in place. And it will stand wave action and some
currents and all that. It looks nice. And as a surveyor, I laid out these picnic cabanas, and I
was - they ordered me to set these cabanas at an angle so that the barbeque grill would be in
the shade on August the 141
h at 4 p.m. And they are.
(Laughing.)
Now, how did you figure that?
It's not a great issue. I went to the architectural standards, and it's a nice, big, thick book,
and it has a table. So all I had to do was set off the bearing, the correct bearing.
Did you - were you involved at all in any of those studies for proposed reservoirs in the early
to mid-~80s ? Did any of those ever get to a surveying stage?
33
So what would you have done as the contracting officer?
It's a job - it's coordination and administration, and we work with the NRCS with their
engineers and inspectors. And it's just - the River Authority sent me to a roller-compacted
concrete school at Fort Worth so I was able to work on that portion of it with a little
intelligence. It's kind of an oversight, oversight agency to work between the contractor and
the NRCS administration.
So was that process a different - the roller compaction business, was that a different process
than y 'all had used in the past on dams?
Yeah. It is a method that's used - we had our first trial in Uvalde. The NRCS was adapting
to this technique, and they had a trial project in Uvalde, and that preceded Site 10. And H'
Zachry was the contractor on Site 10, and we had a public stir because they set their - they
have what we call a pug mill, and a pug mill is two metal hoppers. They stand up, like, 40
feet in the air. One was painted red and the other one was green or something; very vivid.
Everybody on Thousand Oaks was concerned; they didn't know what was going to happen,
so we had to calm their fears. Everything went well; there was no disturbance to the
neighborhood. There was some anticipation, but it didn't develop.
And the project was executed in first-class order; it was even - what it is, on roller-compacted
concrete, you use a very low water content, and it's not flowable at all; it's almost
a dry mix, it looks stiff. And it's put in place, and when it's - the heavy compaction is used
35
other things.
And one ofthe branch channels, this huge structure had been undermined; water had gotten
under it. So we replaced that and pumped a very stiff grout under it to fill the void and ~
support - this thing is 200 feet across; that's a lot of weight to just hang out there in the air.
So we fixed that, little things like that.
What the deal was, the River Authority because of our responsibility to the downstream
counties, we kind of used our bonding capacity to help them to execute this project, and
that's how we got involved in it.
What was the San Juan Pump Station project?
The San Juan Pump Station is a pump station that supplies water to the remnant of the
historic river channel there in that area at Pyron, and it also has one branch of pipe that goes
to the historic San Juan Acequia. We had a lot of issues with water rights, and the legislature
re-adjudicated all the old traditional water rights 20 years ago. Before that time, water rights
were very important and highly protected by the courts, and private ownership was quite ­ownerships
were quite well-established.
The acequias have a history that goes back to 1730, and when the Corps improved the
channel, a lot of these dams and acequias were cut off, the water source was cut off. A dam
was built at Pyron back in thej70s, and it backed water up where it would - but gravity
37
rv
Was that another project where you worked with UTSA or with Wayne Cox ­A
Yeah.
- in uncovering?
Yes.
So how would that work? In other words, there must have been some backhoe work that was
involved and heavy equipment work. Was he out there monitoring, or how was it done?
......--...
Yeah. We would - it's very carefully- the archfeologists, when they know that there..tS ~
'--'
sensitive artifacts around, they hand dig. But this was a dam, and we were able to see part of
it. It wasn't exposed, we knew where to dig, and it was done very, very carefully. What you
do, you excavate with a machine at a distance from the object, and you hand dig to it so
there's no damage by the backhoe itself.
We found an artifact at the dam. We were expecting pottery, arrowheads, shells. Found a
Model T battery.
(Laughing.)
Well, you have to take what you get, I guess.
39
So how does the Medina River tie in here?
That's - I don't know how that was selected, but the San Antonio River, below 1604, it's
pretty much native habitat. I think there is a spot there that was considered originally. But
the Medina River, see, is a tributary, so it stands that it would be considered part of our
drainage system, overall system.
So did the River Authority do something on the Medina River to counteract impact on the San
Antonio River, or was it the other way around?
The mitigation, I guess, would be to foster natural conditions in wildlife in urban areas that
are beyond that capability anymore, so you don't have many options. The options are not
that great.
But as far as the wildlife adapting, it does to a certain extent. These mallard ducks that you
see down here begging for crumbs, they're not domestic mallards. We've had the Mexican
)
wood duck, we had one of .th'em -~nest under the building in a storm drain down there, and
the little ducklings run out the pipe and run to the river. And in season, there are a lot of the
Mexican wood ducks. And these ducks, they have a stature like a goose; they walk more
with the upright stature like a goose would, and they are prone to nest in trees.
And they are not that afraid of people; they like to make nests around farms, and the ones
that have adopted the city here, they just get to be a nuisance;they get to be so accustomed to
41
Can you -you mentioned something earlier, and I don 't know if you really want to go into it
or not, but I'll ask it anyway, something about the relationship between the River Authority
and the fity having gone awry at some point.
There's always personality conflicts, but over the long haul, we've always had a good
relationship with the ~y. Thefty likes to delegate a lot of drainage problems to us, and we
only had a problem with one of our board members having - what he did, he tried to run for
one ofthejounty ¢ommissioner's offices. And there was some conflict and all there and
some bad feelings, and he lost. And the offended jountfommissioner saw to it that our
funds were cut off. But that was personalities; that wasn't agencies, that was two individuals
that caused the problem. And that's rare, that's rare.
Did you ever participate in any of the skeet shoots?
I'm a lousy shot. I am known to shoot doves off a wire, so the skeet were - it's fun, it's fun
to go shoot at skeet. But like I say, some of the guys were really involved, very intense about
it. But as far as being competitive, I enjoyed, really, just the outing.
Was it typical for you-all to get together outside of work?
We had picnics out at Site 10. And Dorian French would always gather his engineers like a
duck with her ducklings, you know, they'd go do different projects and stuff and all. Even
show them some of the complex - some complex issues and all. We had a good working and
43
about that.
So would those have been employees of the River Authority or would they have been
subcontractors?
Well, we've had some work with our utility people and some - most with contractors, so
both sides.
(End of interview.)
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