CEMEX wants to blast a 600-foot deep pit along San Joaquin River. We must stop them | Opinion
The biggest threat to Fresno’s greatest natural resource is ready to strike.
If community members don’t rally to the occasion and stop this predator in its tracks, a multinational mining corporation will gain permission to pillage and plunder the San Joaquin River for another 100 years. With license to employ methods that cause more environmental damage than those used for the last century.
Fresno County residents have rallied for such causes in the not-too-distant past. In 2012, an outpouring of citizen criticism prevented CEMEX from blasting away Jesse Morrow Mountain near Yokuts Valley. Now it’s up to us to keep the same company from dynamiting the San Joaquin River bottom 3 miles outside the Fresno city limits.
Yes, dynamiting. To continue operations in areas depleted by alluvial mining (i.e. extracting gravel, crushed stone, sand and clay from stream bed deposits), CEMEX is seeking county approval to blast and drill a 600-foot deep pit into the river’s bedrock.
Six hundred feet! That’s the length of two football fields.
I sounded the initial alarm about CEMEX’s destructive intentions for California’s second-longest river as it flows toward the state’s fifth-largest city in January 2020.
Goodness that feels like a lifetime ago.
CEMEX initially sought to begin blasting and drilling with a simple modification to the permits for its Rockfield aggregate mining operation, rather than for the project to undergo a thorough environmental review as mandated by the California Environmental Quality Act.
But that proved too industry friendly even for Fresno County, compelling county planners and an outside contractor to devote much of the last five years preparing the requisite environmental documents. (The first for CEMEX’s quarry site since the Nixon administration.)
Draft EIR published, NOI issued
On Dec. 20, the Friday preceding two holiday weeks, the Fresno County Public Works and Planning Department published the draft Environmental Impact Report for CEMEX’s Rockfield Quarry Modification Project and issued a Notice of Intent to advise government agencies as well as the public.
The lengthy draft EIR (Volume 1 containing the executive summary through Chapter 10 is 1,093 pages) is available at the county planning department website (click on current EIRs and then CEMEX Rockfield Expansion), the CEQAnet Web Portal or on the sixth floor of 2220 Tulare Street in downtown Fresno.
A public informational meeting – not a hearing – about CEMEX’s proposal, the environmental report and the public review process will be held from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday on Zoom. Public comment on the draft EIR will be accepted through Feb. 17.
Under CEQA, the report’s authors must respond to every public comment, address concerns of state and federal agencies and make necessary revisions. These are compiled into a final EIR, which has a separate public review and comment period before the report can be certified and the project reaches the Fresno County Planning Commission.
CEMEX’s proposal doesn’t get a proper public vetting until that point. And unless the planning commission’s decision gets appealed, there’s no guarantee the project ever goes before the Fresno County Board of Supervisors.
It’s up to anyone who cares about the health of the San Joaquin River, the dream of a San Joaquin River Parkway and/or the well-being of the natural habitat to raise as loud a stink as possible against this preposterous plan.
Rockfield outlasts 2005 ‘horizon date’
Aggregate deposits near the river accessible by alluvial mining are all but gone. That’s the reason Vulcan Materials, CEMEX’s primary competitor, ceased operations on the San Joaquin in 2017 and headed elsewhere.
CEMEX was supposed to have pulled up stakes and left, too. (The “horizon date” for its Rockfield operation was 2005.) Instead, the company kept getting its operating permits extended – paying zero road impact fees to the City of Fresno despite the thousands of semi-trucks traveling Friant Road to reach Highway 41 – with the bare minimum of environmental review until the blast mine proposal could be prepared for launch.
In 2023, when county leaders granted CEMEX an extension to continue operating, I was disappointed by the lack of organized public opposition. As well as puzzled by the silence from the Department of Fish and Wildlife, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other agencies entrusted with protecting the environment.
Things will be different this time, per my understanding. The pushback will include professionals with the expertise necessary to fully flesh out the project’s devastating environmental impacts and provide technical point-by-point opposition.
Nothing, however, will get the attention of the powers-that-be like a deluge of public comments to the draft EIR expressing strong, smart opposition to the blast mine. It also wouldn’t hurt to call or email newly elected Fresno County supervisors Garry Bredefeld and Luis Chavez to remind them of their campaign pledges to examine CEMEX’s plan with a critical eye.
CEMEX is a multinational company headquartered in Mexico, where last fall the lower house of that nation’s Congress passed a bill banning the same type of open pit mining the company wants to do in Fresno County.
If blasting and drilling a 600-foot deep pit next to a major river isn’t kosher in Mexico, it should be equally beyond the pale for the San Joaquin Valley.
This story was originally published January 14, 2025 at 12:00 PM.
