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A Year After Harvey, Push Expected for Stricter Regulation of Sand Mining Industry

Posted on September 12, 2018

The Sandra Kay, a clunky-looking dredge made of metal beams and cables, moves slowly over the surface of a murky pond in southeastern Montgomery County.

Its odd appearance notwithstanding, this floating contraption is a vital tool in a flourishing industry that fuels the construction of roads, bridges and buildings across greater Houston and around the world.

The Sandra Kay is owned and operated by Hallett Materials, which runs one of the largest sand mining operations on the San Jacinto River. Workers extract about 1.2 million tons of sand per year from Hallett’s 1,100-acre property near Porter — one of about 30 similar operations on the east and west forks of the San Jacinto upstream from Lake Houston, according to state data.

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Sand is a key ingredient in concrete and asphalt, the basic building materials of a growing metropolitan region. Demand for the product is insatiable. Except for some weekend breaks, the Hallett facility operates 24-7.

“There’s a lot of concrete being poured in the Houston area,” said Tim Mallicoat, the chief operating officer for the Rasmussen Group, Hallett’s parent company.

Over the past year, though, concern that sand mines may have worsened floods triggered by Hurricane Harvey has brought renewed scrutiny to the industry, which now faces pressure to embrace practices used elsewhere to protect the environmentally sensitive areas where the mines operate. Legislators representing affected communities say they will push for stricter regulation when the Legislature reconvenes in January.

“The current fines are not robust enough to discourage illegal dumping and poor business practices,” said state Rep. Dan Huberty, a Kingswood Republican who sponsored a 2011 law that imposed the first state licensing requirements on sand and gravel mines. Huberty said he and Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, intend to push for more regulation in the coming session.

Read more: As sand shrinks river capacity, Kingwood residents feel like ‘sitting ducks’ for floods

The sand and gravel industry, backed by some experts, has consistently maintained that its operations were not responsible for the sedimentation of the San Jacinto River and Lake Houston, which reduced the capacity of those waterways to hold floodwaters during Harvey. Nevertheless, industry leaders have met with Huberty and Creighton and are prepared to work with lawmakers on a “common-sense approach” to regulation, said David Perkins, the executive director of the Texas Aggregates and Concrete Association, or TACA.

“Continuing that dialogue as we lead into the session is critical,” Perkins said.

Concern about sand mines on the San Jacinto River, however, didn’t start with Harvey. Years earlier, environmental groups were sounding alarms about the impact of the growing industry.

In 2006, American Rivers, a nonprofit focused on keeping the nation’s streams healthy, included the San Jacinto River on its annual list of the nation’s 10 most endangered waterways. Its report said nothing about the best-known environmental problem on the river: the San Jacinto waste pits, a carcinogen-laden Superfund site near Baytown, miles downstream from the Lake Houston dam.

Instead, the report focused on sand mines.

“Sand mining threatens to permanently damage the San Jacinto watershed,” the report stated. Sedimentation caused by the sand mines, it said, increased turbidity, or cloudiness, in the river and downstream in Galveston Bay, harming fish, freshwater mussels and other aquatic life while reducing the supply of drinking water available from Lake Houston.

Editorial: Texas needs a sand plan for preventing floods

Ten years after the American Rivers report, another national conservation group called the sand and gravel industry “a major threat to water quality in the west fork of the San Jacinto River.” The river’s east and west forks originate in Walker County, flow through Montgomery County and merge near Lake Houston; from there, the river flows southeast to Galveston Bay.

The 2016 report by the Trust for Public Land noted that mining operations use open pits that “remove topsoil and completely eliminate vegetation.” It said the portion of the west fork’s floodplain affected by sand mining had grown from 7 percent in 1995 to 25 percent in 2014.

Similar concerns are emerging around the world as development gobbles up a resource once seen as virtually inexhaustible. Humans consume nearly 50 billion tons of sand and gravel every year, most of it used to make concrete, journalist Vince Beiser writes in a new book, “The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How it Transformed Civilization.”

Beiser notes the ubiquity of a substance that few people consider except when they go to the beach: “Take a glance out the window,” he writes. “All those other buildings you see are also made from sand. So is the glass in that window. So are the miles of asphalt roads that connect all those buildings. So are the silicon chips that are the brains of your computer and smartphone.”

Mining the sand needed to make these products, Beiser writes, has exacted a cost: “All around the world, sand mining is slaughtering river-dwelling fish and birds, damaging coral reefs, undermining bridges and causing riverbanks to collapse.”

The potential for effects like these on the San Jacinto River troubled Jennifer Lorenz when she was the executive director of the Houston-based Bayou Land Conservancy, which works to conserve land adjacent to the area’s waterways. The 2006 American Rivers report was based in part on Lorenz’s research.

Around the time the report came out, Lorenz said, she and others urged state legislators to regulate the industry. Those efforts led to passage of a 2011 bill requiring so-called “aggregate processing operations” — sand and gravel mines — to register with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Lorenz, now a nonprofit consultant, said the 2011 law was a first step toward effective regulation. But additional requirements and stronger enforcement, including stiffer fines, are badly needed, she said.

“The law was basically a hand slap,” Lorenz said. “We didn’t get a hammer; we got a teeny-tiny nail.”

The TCEQ conducted 251 surveys of sand and gravel mines in 2017, issued 143 notices of violations and assessed $291,201 in penalties, according to its annual enforcement report.

Most of the violations involved discharges that occurred when dikes separating mines from rivers were breached. Most penalties were in the range of $4,000 to $6,000 per violation, agency records show.

Huberty, the Kingwood state legislator, pointed to best practices for sand and gravel mining in Louisiana as a possible model for Texas. These practices, developed jointly by the state and industry leaders, include planting vegetation on stream banks to reduce erosion and maintaining a minimum 100-foot buffer zone between mines and streams.

Bob Rehak, a Kingwood retiree who has spent much of the year since Harvey researching sand mining and its effects on the San Jacinto River, has developed his own list of recommended practices. He posted them on his website, reduceflooding.com, which has become a go-to resource about Harvey and flooding issues for Lake Houston-area residents.

Rehak said the mines should be moved out of floodways, where most of those on the San Jacinto are located. (Floodways are the areas of swiftly flowing water at the center of floodplains.) He also called for requiring performance bonds to reduce cleanup costs, increasing the width of dikes separating mines from rivers, and decreasing the slope of the dikes.

In addition to potential new regulations, Huberty sees potential for collaborative efforts that would benefit the sand mining industry and the surrounding communities. The industry, he said, could use its equipment and expertise to dredge silted-up rivers such as the San Jacinto, then process and sell the dredged sand.

Source: Houston Chronicle

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