06:30 AM CDT on Thursday, July 13, 2006

By Doug Miller / 11 News

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If you drive south out of Houston for about an hour and you know where to turn off, you’ll come to a little town called River’s End.

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The San Bernard River is simply dying.

One look at the deserted buildings, the sunken shrimp boats, the fading signs of a dying town makes you wonder what happened to that place.

Go out on the river with some of the people who still live here and they’ll tell you a sad story.

“Twenty years ago, it was a bustling little community,” said one.

They’ll show you the abandoned businesses and tell that you really should have seen it a few years ago.

“You’d have seen probably three dozen shrimp boats.  You’d have seen a half a dozen bars, bait houses, little convenience stores.  You would have seen a thriving little community here,” said another person.

But today, if you want to see what happened to River’s End, you have to go to the end of the river.

The San Bernard River flows 125 miles through the coastal plains of central Texas. Longer than Texans have lived in Texas, the river has run to the Gulf of Mexico.

Now, before its waters reach the Gulf, the San Bernard just comes to a stop.

“This is the area where the river went into the Gulf of Mexico in about 1995,” said Rivers End rresident Mark Hazelrigg.

Now a wide spit of beach sand a newly-formed delta block the spot where the San Bernard once met the Gulf.

It is a young geological formation and in a way, it starts a few miles inland.

The San Bernard’s problems trace to another Texas river, the Brazos. 

Way back in the 1920s, the federal government dug a channel that basically changed the way the Brazos River flowed into the Gulf of Mexico. 

The idea was to make it easier for ships to navigate the Brazos around Freeport.  The problem is that it dumped a whole lot of sand down the Texas coastline toward the San Bernard.

Over the decades, the Brazos River sand flowing down the coast crossed the mouth of the San Bernard.

By 1990, the sand started forming a delta that drove the San Bernard’s mouth down the coast.

As the San Bernard shifted and narrowed, most of its water diverted through the Intercoastal Canal toward the Brazos.

Then, last year a metrological event, Hurricane Rita hit the Texas coastline.

That accelerated a geological transformation.

So now, in a place so remote fishermen reach it only by boat

You can walk on the beach that was the mouth of the San Bernard.

The fishing’s changing.  The ecology is changing.  From talking to the crabbers and all, there’s a lot less crabs here in the last two years.

And because boats can no longer reach the Gulf on the San Bernard, the people who live on the river will tell you the shrimpers have moved away.

“Oh, it’s a heartbreak.  It’s a total heartbreak to see it.  Beautiful river, good industry, a community that was active and alive and it’s gone stagnant, just like the river has,” said resident Pat Webb.

Now the few people who still live along the San Bernard here will tell you the river is dying.

The mouth of the San Bernard River is gone today but it could return tomorrow.

Activists living along the river are working with their congressman, Ron Paul trying to win federal dollars to dredge out a new mouth for this Texas river.

But it won’t be cheap, with reported cost estimates of up to $10 million.