Meeting Ben: The Great Trajectory Shift

A 1980s Tech Pivot Prevented the Richland-Chambers Basin from a Subsurface Flood

By 1985, the Texas sun had baked the Navarro and Freestone county lines into a cracked, dusty basin. Below the surface lay a labyrinth of historical oil fields—thousands of old wellbores punched into the earth across a century of drilling. Above the surface, the clock was ticking. The Tarrant Regional Water District (TRWD), under the legendary general management of Ben Hickey, was preparing to build a massive earthen dam. This dry valley was slated to become the Richland-Chambers Reservoir, a 41,000-acre lake designed to secure the future water supply of North Texas.

But a hidden, toxic threat loomed. If even a single old wellbore remained unplugged or improperly sealed, the incoming millions of gallons of water would create immense hydrostatic pressure. Water would migrate into freshwater aquifers, or worse, residual oil and toxic brine would leak directly upward, permanently poisoning the public drinking supply.

To stop this nightmare scenario, the engineers needed a map. Not a hand-drawn paper sketch, but a definitive, highly accurate digital blueprint of every subsurface hazard in the basin. At the time, I was a 2nd-year engineering student attending school at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). When this high-stakes project landed in my lap, I was thrown into a race against a hard flooding deadline. Armed with early AutoCAD software, an advanced hardware rig, and a massive stack of flawed Texas Railroad Commission reports and county parcel maps, my job was to build the digital sentinels that would protect Richland-Chambers for the next forty years. Little did I know, that project would completely rewrite my destiny.

Wrestling with 1980s Hardware

Stepping into the project office in the mid-1980s felt like stepping onto a digital frontier. Today, engineers take seamless, cloud-based Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and mobile apps for granted. In 1985, we were working with raw coordinate geometry and sheer computing willpower.

Instead of a standard, corporate IBM machine, my primary weapon was one of the very first non-IBM brand x86 computers equipped with a rare color graphics card and a dedicated color display. For an era dominated by text-only monochrome screens, having a color monitor to differentiate between overlapping wellbores, property lines, and water boundaries was a massive technological advantage.

The process was an intensely tactile, multi-layered puzzle. To input the data, I used a massive, heavy digitizing pad—measuring roughly two feet by two feet—and a multi-button crosshair puck. Working with the historical Texas Railroad Commission (TRRC) quadruplicate plugging forms, operator ledgers, and survey plats I had to tape plats and maps down onto the table to manually trace and digitize wellbore locations then meticullously reconcile the location across data sources.

The real nightmare was the local county parcel maps. Available only on physical paper or blueprints, these maps were a mess of historical inaccuracies. Many relied on 19th-century metes-and-bounds descriptions—referencing landmarks like "the old oak tree" or "the bend in the creek"—that had vanished decades prior. Using the digitizing pad, I had to reconcile these distorted property lines with the exact, unyielding coordinate points of the wellbores on my color display. If a wellbore appeared on a TRRC log but didn’t align logically with the parcel data, it meant a field crew had to go out, physically inspect the ground, and find the wellhead before the valley was inundated.

The Symphony of the Pen Plotter and a Career Pivot

Once the vector data was digitized and carefully verified in AutoCAD, it had to be brought back into the physical world. I would load large sheets of heavy paper into a roaring Hewlett-Packard pen plotter, lock in the color ink pens, and execute the plot command.

The machine would come alive with a mechanical, high-pitched symphony. The pen carriage zipped left and right, and the paper rolled back and forth with rhythmic clicks and whirs. Line by line, node by node, the plotter drew the precise geometry of the reservoir’s subsurface. We compiled these large-format prints into thick, bound volumes—the final "as-built" defense for the basin before the flooding began.

As I watched that x86 computer process complex geometric coordinates and watched the HP plotter translate digital data into flawless physical lines, a lightbulb went off. I realized that while I loved the problem-solving aspect of civil engineering, the stuff happening inside the machine, the computer and its peripherals, was truly intriguing. The sheer power of computing to solve massive, real-world structural problems captivated me.

Right then and there, the Richland-Chambers project convinced me to switch my major to Computer Science and pursue that path through to graduation.

It was a pivot that panned out beautifully. That trajectory shift in school launched a highly successful thirty-one year career in tech rife with trajectory shifts across ten distinct business domains with twelve of those years spent operating my own independent company. The meticulous data management, logical troubleshooting, and system integration skills I cut my teeth on during the reservoir project became bedrock of my entire professional life.

The 40-Year Success Vector

Before the reservoir filled during the summer of 1987, over 700 wellbores were identified, located and mapped. Dry valleys of Richland and Chambers creeks vanished beneath waves, creating Texas’s third-largest inland reservoir. I earned a bachelor of science in computer science with a minor in mathematics that winter. Now, four decades later, the effectiveness of that early digital project has revealed itself through a flawless success vector. Over forty years, the Richland-Chambers Reservoir has experienced zero catastrophic wellbore failures, zero massive aquifer breaches, and zero systemic toxic leaks. Zero. Nada. Zip. Ideal results.

Remarkably, the data I digitized as a sophomore engineering student is still actively serving North Texas today. In the 1990s and 2000s, as the engineering world migrated to modern GIS systems, TRWD and the TRRC didn't throw out our work. Because our AutoCAD files were built on exact coordinate geometry, they were cleanly imported into Esri ArcGIS databases, converting our lines and point nodes into foundational vector shapefiles.

The inaccuracies of the old paper county parcel maps were eventually solved by modern satellite mapping and global coordinate datums like NAD83. When the state laid these modern digital grids over our historical data, our wellbore coordinates locked right into place. Today, if you open the interactive TRRC Public GIS Map Viewer and click on the blue waters of Richland-Chambers, the exact digital well points that appear on the screen are the ones I plotted on that early x86 color monitor just over forty years ago.

A Quiet Legacy

Even modern marine technology has failed to find errors in that original dataset. When TRWD conducts bathymetric or side-scan sonar mapping of the lake bed today, they face a major obstacle: forty years of river silt has buried many of the old wellhead caps under feet of mud. Because standard sonar cannot easily see through thick silt, modern engineers still look back at our 1980s pre-inundation records to know exactly where subsurface hazards lie. In the world of infrastructure engineering, a job well done is usually a quiet one. The absolute silence of the Richland-Chambers wellbores over the last forty years is the ultimate validation of our work.

Epilogue

Sitting alone in the lab obsessing over precision digitization of some wellbore discovered at the last minute which needed to be transformed from paper and cataloged into the system, the project director and a short, portly man smoking a cigarette came in and walked up beside my workstation to watch what I was doing. Without looking away from my task at hand, I told the man to put out the cigarette or to leave the room. It wasn't personal. I prohibited smoking near the computer. I didn't know who the smoking man was but I did know the smoke from his cigarette could make the unsealed hard disk drive of the computer crash catastrophically. A disk crash in those days could be a project killer since backups were made by copying files onto floppy disks, which I had not yet had a chance to do that day.

That man was Ben F. Hickey. He had been working as General Manager of the Tarrant Regional Water District, now in charge of overseeing the reservoir project, before I was born.

Looking back, I realize I had pushed early computing tech to its absolute limits, then, but the true turning point of that project came down to a single word uttered by Ben through a cloud of smoke. A turning point which caused a great tajectory shift in my pro career quest.

Standing up to Ben Hickey—a legendary Texas powerhouse accustomed to moving rivers and building dams by sheer force of will—to protect a fragile, unsealed x86 hard drive from a mote of cigarette waste material remains the ultimate highlight of my engineering youth. His blunt, defeated "Shit" as he stubbed out that cigarette was the exact moment the old guard of sledgehammer infrastructure bowed to the unyielding rules of the incoming digital age of precision data finesse. As a UTA student hunched over that glowing color monitor, intently clicking away on a Summagraphics pad and listening to the whine of an HP plotter, I wasn't just saving a database from a catastrophic head crash; I was unconsciously launching a 31-year career in computer science.

Today, while the digital nodes, boundaries and vectors I plotted remain essentially out of public eyes, they are still protecting the drinking water of millions of Texans, and I always look back fondly on the day the focused, determined, mildly OCD-afflicted geek of a college kid I was brought a Texas water general to heel—all for the cause of vital data preservation.