PEARLAND, Texas – A Pearland pasture was flooded by a construction crew working on building a bridge nearby.
The woman who runs the pasture off Bailey Road, near Route 35, says she had no idea the construction company building a bridge nearby was pumping thousands and thousands of gallons of water onto her field.
Dana Lowry says parts of the grass were under about a foot of water.
The water came from an open fire hydrant inside a construction zone for a bridge on Bailey Road near Wells Drive.
“The water was pumping. I didn’t realize it until I came back at one and walked out there,” Lowry said. “I had no clue that was happening and neither did the landowner. I don’t know what they thought, but they thought wrong.”
As a result of the water, her horses as well as her customer’s horses haven’t been able to graze on the grass. Lowry says it’s too dangerous to let the horses out in the saturated pasture.
“It takes a big strain on their feet, pulling shoes off, rain rot, foot rot. That’s contributed to wet ground,” she said.
The big question - Why would the construction workers leave the hydrant open to waste water and your taxpayer dollars?
Gage: “How long was water coming out of that fire hydrant?”
Dana: “From at least 8 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.”
Gage: “Hours.”
Dana: “Hours.”
Gage: “Thousands of gallons.”
Dana: “Yes.”
Gage: “And it just flooded your field.”
Dana: “This whole place? Yes.”
Dana: “From here to that, it was rising on the other side of this little gully right here. I don’t know if they thought it was a drainage ditch, but you can see it has nowhere to go. We didn’t have within this boundary. There’s no runoff.”
She tried asking the city and the contractor what happened here. According to Lowry, both pointed the finger at each other.
Meanwhile, her horses are stuck inside their stalls and she has to dig deep into her pocket to pay for hay and feed instead of free grass.
“Figure a bale a day per horse right now, $15 a bale. So you take eight horses.”
Fed up, she called KPRC 2′s Gage Goulding to get answers straight from the horse’s mouth.
The foreman with the contractor, R Construction, said he wasn’t able to comment.
The City of Pearland confirmed the contractor was a city contractor.
“The Capital Projects department is connecting the resident and the contractor to work directly on a resolution,” a city spokesperson said.
“We don’t budget for this. Horses are not cheap,” Lowry said. “We don’t put this in our budget for something like this to happen. Mother nature we cannot control. We understand that. This was controllable. Just somebody’s screw up.”
Lowry tells KPRC 2 that the construction crew says they plan on using the water again on Monday. But this time, you can bet it won’t be in her pasture.
“They’re not going to if I have anything to do with it,” she said.