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Article – Quarry |
Reprinted courtesy of West County Gazette, February 2004 Quarry Expansion Report by Vesta Copestakes, Editor, West County Gazette The Town Meeting room was packed! Clearly this is an issue that people are charged about. After an initial welcome by Joan Riback, founder of the Forestville Planning Association, representatives from the Pocket Canyon Protection Group brought us up to date on the Timber Harvest Plan (see separate article for full details.) One of the facts they brought up is that unlike the quarry expansions, the timber harvest land-owners didn’t have to get an Environmental Impact Report done in order to proceed. Ultimately, whether the trees are harvested or not is left up to the California Department of Forestry. In the case of the quarries, full EIRs must be done and hearings must be held for the public, then ALL concerns are reviewed before any action can be taken. Because we always like to get brought up to date on all matters, Mike Reilly came to present the Air Quality Summary and answer questions. You’ll find the Air Quality Summary at the end of this article along with other relevant articles. Mike Sojak from the Permit and Resource Management Department came to answer questions as well. And just in case you are all curious about that proposed development across form Speer’s Market, we learned from Mike (at the FPA board meeting) that it’s still under review and that it will have to go through some hoops in order to be built and one of those hoops is a public hearing. So keep tuned! The Forestville Planning Association then turned the meeting over to El Molino High School teacher, John Grech to moderate the presentations and discussion. Wendell Trappe (owner) represented Canyon Rock along with Nick Tibbets, his environmental consultant. And Dean Soiland (owner) and Bill Williams, quarry manager, spoke for BoDean, also known as Blue Rock from its previous incarnation. Representing the opposite side of the fence was Sig Andeman and Ramona Crinella of Forestville. Each party got four minutes to present his/her case and then the discussion was opened for questions and discussion. 
The bottom line of these discussions is the issue of both quarries asking for expansions. In the case of Canyon Rock, they are not asking to increase their production, but are asking to expand north into the land they bought to allow them to mine longer than their current land holdings will allow. BoDean plans to expand both into fresh land (they, too, are running out of useable land) and to increase production as well. Currently Canyon is allowed to mine up to 500,000 cubic yards of rock per year and BoDean, 140,000.
Ultimately, the biggest issue concerning local residents is the potential for increased truck traffic. Canyon’s expansion plans will only increase their truck traffic if they actually mine to their current limit, which they do not currently. An increase in production limits for BoDean would mean an increase in truck traffic, especially since they are currently running under production limits as well. When the Bypass is built, downtown truck traffic will be diverted onto the bypass and if all goes well, will come out south past the elementary school as the trucks head towards Sebastopol. But traffic heading toward River Road will still go down Mirabel Road, which concerns many residents along that path. At least when the West County Trail gets built along Mirabel, there will be a 4’ land barrier between the trucks and the pedestrians. There’s no way to get around the noise, however. And speaking of noise, I’m not the only person who noticed that the Harley Davidson motorcycles that passed the meeting hall were louder than any truck which passed! But back to the issue at hand… The bottom line on truck traffic is that increased production will, in fact, mean more trucks. There’s no way around that one. But an interesting fact is that for both quarries, gravel travels out from the source only about ten miles in any direction. For one, there are quarries scattered throughout the county that take care of the same approximate terrain circle from each: Cazadero takes the coast to Guerneville, Healdsburg takes from Cloverdale to Santa Rosa, Mark West takes from the edge of Napa to Santa Rosa, Santa Rosa takes the mid zone and Petaluma takes the south. An important factor in why this works is because for every 30 miles a gravel truck travels, the cost of that gravel doubles. According to both quarries, the only time any of their products have traveled farther than that limit is because they have a particular color of rock needed by landscapers out of the area.  When the concept of bringing gravel here from Marysville and the old gold mines in the Sierras came up, again that cost factor became an issue. Add to that the fact that a railroad would need to be built to the tune of $10 million to accomplish the task and you can see why it’s not going to happen in the foreseeable future.
Now for some cities who have out-lawed gravel mines, gravel is coming in from as far as Canada and Mexico. It comes by train and by barge to central distribution points then is trucked out to customers. You may wonder how happy the Canadians are about that… “Three years ago, the view from Cheryl Millican’s waterfront home on the bay north of Vancouver, British Columbia, was exquisite. Now she looks out upon a conveyor belt that links Canada’s largest gravel pit to the biggest public works project in California: the $2.6 billion reconstruction of the east span of the Bay Bridge… California’s passion for protecting it’s own back yard from dust, noise and scars of mining is beginning to shift the pain of producing those natural resources to other landscapes and cultures.” (source: www.sacbee.com/static/live/news/projects/denial/08172003.html) This is no simple subject and the Not In My Back Yard syndrome plays a big part in the discussion. So who’s back yard? Mexico, which has less stringent environmental laws and therefore whose citizens suffer greater? “The only ones winning are the Americans,” said Guadalupe Uribe, local farmhand from Baja California. “This community is losing, and the environment is, too.” So consider the environmental issues. California is famous world-wide for our tough environmental laws. Businesses move out of state to avoid them. But do the environmental hazards hurt less somewhere else? Here, at least we can see first-hand how our laws protect us. Both Wendell Trappe and Dean Soiland invited every person attending the meeting and any person concerned with their environmental record to come visit their gravel mines. I did and I was impressed with what I saw. BoDean is a much newer plant than Canyon because Soiland bought the mine only a few years ago and completely cleaned the place of old debris, set up state-of-the-art equipment and graded the property to catch all rain run-off into holding ponds that settle sediment before it is released into locals waterways. Their reclamation of previous mined land is built in a bench system that slows water descending the hills on its way to the ponds. The entire mining area is watered down throughout the day to keep dust levels down and each conveyor belt coming from the rock crushing machines are sprayed with water throughout the process and even have computerized sensors to keep the drop from the belt to the top of the pile to a minimum to eliminate dust. Although Canyon is a much older operation, they too grade their property to channel run-off into sediment ponds, water their yard and water spray the conveyor belts and gravel throughout the process. They also reclaim land as they move to new hillsides so that only the land they are currently mining from is exposed and the rest is in the process of reclamation. And because Canyon’s property runs along Green Valley Creek, they created a massive soil berm that is irrigated and planted with trees and native plants that shades that section of the creek. This winter they will also be moving the Redi-Mix plant from its current location of 150’ from the creek to 735’ from the creek in an effort to further protect the waterway.  Both quarries plan to expand onto new land to keep their operations producing aggregate into the future. What that means to downtown Forestville is that if the expansion plans get approved by the county Board of Supervisors, we will be living with the quarries well into the next twenty years or more. For many people this is unacceptable.
Again, they point to the truck traffic. Yes, the bypass will help, but there is no help for Mirabel Road and River Road. Both run like minor highways, carrying the bulk of traffic of all kinds: trucks, cars and motorcycles. Current traffic patterns see traffic on 116 turning down Mirabel to River the majority of the time and River carrying the most throughout the day and night. Fortunately for us, gravel trucks run Monday through Friday and morning to evening, mostly during the summer months when construction is at its peak. But that’s also when we are outside trying to enjoy the weather and are most conscious of the noise and diesel exhaust. So what is our alternative? Kick out the gravel mines. Personally, I believe that our Supervisors will approve these expansions because aggregate is a vital part of all our lives whether we like it or not, and the alternatives are too costly to consider. Within three years our aggregate from the Russian River will dissipate as a means of protecting our precious waterway. This leaves land mining. “California’s hunger for sand and gravel — the two main ingredients in concrete and asphalt — is enormous. In 2000, the state devoured 228 million tons, enough “aggregate” to build an eight lane freeway from Sacramento to New York — 3 percent more than second place Texas.” (same source as above) Locally, we use it for roads, for driveways, for septic systems, for drainage ditches and garden paths. Consider that we are rural. If you define urban as concrete and asphalt, we can define our turf as soil and gravel since it covers the majority if where we live. The benefits of a gravel driveway over an asphalt one are that rain can travel through the gravel to the soil below. According to botanists, this allows the earth to breath in both directions. Put an asphalt driveway over the root system of a tree and you not only deprive it of water, you also leach petrochemicals into the soil and kill the tree over time. Put a gravel driveway over that same root system and the tree drinks as it always has and the gravel doesn’t hurt it a bit. Granted, if it’s on a hill, you have to periodically grade the drive and replace lost gravel as rain washes it into the ditches. Maintenance. The more maintenance, the more gravel you use over time. So this is where gravel mine expansion comes in. Again, I recommend you take the tours I took. In both cases, I was shown the land they plan to expand into. In both cases the slopes travel toward the existing mines, not towards the creek. In both cases the owners will mine only the land they currently need and will reclaim as they grow into new land. In both cases the forested slopes that face the neighbors will remain forested. Yes, you have to have a certain amount of faith that these individuals will do what they say they will and will respect their land and our future. Fortunately because this IS California with the most stringent environmental laws on the planet, you can expect them to do just what they are told to do or go out of business! My own feeling, beyond that the Supervisors will support this expansion, is that the EIRs will tell us what we need to know about our concerns and that the whole process gives us the right and the time to voice our concerns and force the Powers That Be to pay attention to ALL our concerns as this process moves forward. We’re ALL in this together. That includes Dean Soiland, Wendell Trappe, Mike Reilly and you and me. It’s our responsibility to educate ourselves about the details that concern us, and with that knowledge, make our decision about what we want for our future. This is not an emotional decision. This is a practical reality that we all will be living with — not just us in Forestville, but across the planet as we rely on others for resources we can’t supply from our own back yard. Please address your comments to: Vesta Copestakes. Back to Top Back to Issues & Updates Page |