Jimmy Paz, manager of the Sabal Palm Audubon Center and Sanctuary in Brownsville, walks along a ditch dug to let the Rio Grande River flow into the Gulf of Mexico.
BROWNSVILLE -- The Rio Grande is flowing all the way to the Gulf of Mexico again, thanks to three men from Mexico who skipped the red tape and put their backs into it.
Armed only with shovels, the trio dug a 400-foot ditch in two days to free up the Rio Grande at Boca Chica Beach and send the water on its way for the first time in almost a year. The ditch is designed to relieve residual flooding caused by the clogged river.
"It almost takes an act of Congress to do something like that," Xavier Rios, supervisory Border Patrol agent in McAllen, said in the Brownsville Herald Wednesday. An official dredging project failed after four months because the flow wasn't enough to prevent sediment from rebuilding.
Border Patrol agents said the men told them their homes had been flooded because the river's water was spreading through flatlands instead of into the Gulf....
