This story was originally published by Fresnoland.
A billion-dollar blast mine planned along the San Joaquin River’s prime salmon spawning habitat is facing its first major political challenge after months of diplomatic silence from Fresno leaders.
Assemblymember Joaquin Arambula introduced new state legislation last week aimed directly at stopping global mining giant CEMEX from blasting a crater twice as deep as Millerton Lake along the San Joaquin River’s planned parkway near Fresno.
“I am committed to preserving the San Joaquin River and find deeply troubling the mining proposal that could adversely impact the river,” Arambula told Fresnoland in a statement, becoming the first elected official to publicly oppose the project.
Arambula’s bill, AB 1425, sets up a century-defining fight over the control of resources at California’s second-longest river. The pro-development county, who removed developer restrictions on the San Joaquin and Kings Rivers last year to boost real estate plans, has encouraged the mining project over the last half-decade despite Fresno already having a 200% gravel surplus.
Arambula’s bill would toss the county’s playbook for developers in the trash, killing CEMEX’s controversial mining proposal before the county supervisors get a chance to approve it.
In an era where county board of supervisors in Southern California are drawing increasing scrutiny for their pro-developer approvals of homes in extremely fire-prone areas, Arambula’s proposal suggests a new front in bolstering the state’s role in high-risk land use decisions that historically have been left to the purview of county supervisors.
“What the hell is going on there?” said County Supervisor Buddy Mendes about Arambula’s bill. “Why is he trying to do a one off-deal like that?… There’s nothing wrong with what they’re [CEMEX] doing on the river.”
Arambula’s bill proposes to add a section to the state’s public resources code which would ban a key mining procedure from the San Joaquin River Basin when groundwater is shallower than 50 feet below the surface – precisely the conditions at CEMEX’s proposed blast site.
Arambula said he drew inspiration from CEMEX’s home country, Mexico, where open pit mining was banned by the Mexican Legislature last year after Mexico’s president accused Vulcan Materials of overstepping their water rights.
Arambula’s bill arrives as Fresno County officials are encountering overwhelming public opposition from residents. A total of 584 letters were submitted earlier this month, many describing the CEMEX project as an unnecessary assault on nature and public space.
“We are analyzing the legislative proposal. If it seeks to target our Rockfield operations…we disfavor legislative attempts to interfere with existing operational entitlements or to circumvent the established and ongoing CEQA process to review our proposed Modification Plan,” CEMEX wrote in a statement.
San Joaquin River Conservancy’s board chair, in an op-ed for a developer-owned publication, said they are powerless to stop developers from trying to build real estate on the river bottom, instead leaving those decisions to local county supervisors. As Arambula attempts to draw a line in the sand against local control, he appears to have the federal government on his side.
The Bureau of Reclamation and its related entities have issued a stark warning to Fresno County about a potential catastrophe-in-waiting: the river breaching the 600-ft-deep pit.
The proposed mining site – only 200 feet from the river – has a greater than 60% chance of experiencing a major river flood during its 100-year lifespan, according to a letter acquired by Fresnoland.
The Bureau raised concerns with the county, according to a letter acquired by Fresnoland, over CEMEX’s decision to use an unapproved flood map in their environmental review. The map used to analyze the project’s flood risk was CEMEX’s own “alternative” map, according to the Bureau, which was “neither reviewed nor approved by FEMA” and claims that their massive mining site lies outside the river’s floodplain.
Both state and federal flood maps show the blast site is in the river’s 100-year floodplain. The Bureau warned that CEMEX’s mapping approach “increases the risk that flood water will enter the proposed project sites without impact assessments or mitigation measures.”
It is not shocking that federal officials are warning Fresno County about the risks of mining in a floodplain.
About 250 miles north of the CEMEX proposal, county supervisors in northern California have also moved away from locating mining projects in floodplains, after mining pond breaches collapsed the Russian River banks and contaminated watersheds.
“It doesn’t make a lot of sense,” said Don McEnhill, head of the Russian Riverkeepers, a river which experienced a gravel mine collapse a few years ago. “Blasting is probably one of the most damaging, destructive ways you can get gravel. And to do it in a flood plain? Holy, yeah, that seems like a great way to make the community more vulnerable to a lot of things.”
“Luckily, our county board of supervisors had the good sense to say ‘We need a reliable water supply. We need flood protection a lot more than we need gravel here today.’ And they pretty much phased out all river mining.”
Top federal water agency says flood risk at mining site is high
A mining project so large, on a floodplain, using explosives, upstream of practically every property owner on the San Joaquin River, is unprecedented in the city’s history.
To get a sense of the size of the project as a city dweller – imagine a hole two football fields deep, or three Security Bank skyscrapers stacked on top of each other. Imagine while shopping at Marshalls in Riverpark you walk out the front door and see this hole stretching from your feet to Edward’s Theater and Mimi’s Cafe, past REI all the way to the In-N-Out and Chick-Fil-A parking lot. Now imagine two of those holes. The CEMEX blast mine will be twice as big as that.
Now imagine that massive hole, filled with lead and arsenic and other chemicals from blasting and drilling, breached by an engorged river, releasing its toxic contents downstream as it surges towards Fresno. This is the catastrophic scenario that federal officials say CEMEX ignored.
“If the wall of earth separating the river and the open mine gave way, a disaster would result,” 14 concerned residents all wrote to Fresno County.
For their environmental review, CEMEX’s water tests at the company’s existing mining ponds show that lead, arsenic, iron and manganese were concentrated at levels 1,000%-200,000% above drinking water standards. If such a disaster like a mine breach of these chemicals were to happen, federal officials warned, CEMEX doesn’t have a plan.
“[I]t does not appear that the hazardous materials plan accounts for overland flooding of the Quarry site,” the Bureau said. “It appears there is notable risk of capturing river flows [the river breaching the mine] and contaminating river water and groundwater.”
Climate change is raising the stakes even higher for what havoc a breached mine could wreck on Fresno, the Bureau added, as new state data shows that a warmer planet in the coming decades will increase the severity of the San Joaquin River’s floods by over 200%.
But CEMEX came up with their own floodmap using their own data, the company says. At one point, their custom-made simulation of the river’s chaotic flood flows bends at 90-degree angles such that the flood contours perfectly line up with the property lines of their blast site.
“The results [of the new floodmap] show that the project (Plant site and Quarry site) will not encroach into the FEMA floodway, so the project meets local and federal floodway regulations,” CEMEX said in a statement.
What does a storm-fed river do to a gravel mining site? Just a half-mile north of Herndon Avenue on Milburn Avenue sits a cautionary tale of what’s at stake.
In January 1997, an old gravel pit – sharing many characteristics with the CEMEX proposal – experienced a catastrophic breach during a 100-year flood event. The 200-acre site, positioned along the river’s floodplain, quickly transformed into a 225-acre lake when a three-day storm surge overwhelmed the pit’s protective berms.
In a follow-up report, the Department of Fish and Wildlife deemed the breach a disaster, noting significant impacts on river hydraulics and sediment transport. The warm-water pit allowed non-native predatory fish like bass to access the river, threatening future salmon spawning populations. With the original developer long gone, state officials have spent decades trying to isolate the breached pit – now known as Milburn Pond – and cut it off from the river system.
In the aftermath of the 1997 flood, the Army Corps of Engineers were forced to redraw their flood maps for FEMA.
The existing maps were so outdated, officials estimated, that the floodplain between Friant and Highway 99 needed to triple in size from its previous estimates. One river bottom developer, bristling at the Fed’s expanded floodplain, went so far as to tell The Fresno Bee that the new maps were a federal conspiracy to halt riverside development.
Almost 30 years later, it was those updated maps that CEMEX threw out and rewrote as they planned out the blast site. History offers a sobering reality check on the company’s custom flood projections.
Properties on the north side of the proposed blast site – those CEMEX places outside the 100-year flood zone in their new map despite their inclusion in FEMA’s floodplain maps – were completely submerged during the 1997 flood.
As climate change makes such mining breaches increasingly common nationwide, local supervisors are beginning to think twice about adding more risk to their plate of infrastructure liabilities.
But the Fresno County Board of Supervisors appear determined to proceed with the mining application, despite the state’s documented surplus and the mine being on a proposed parkway. About 15 years ago, they even entertained leasing out a public park next door so that it could be mined.
Supervisor Mendes framed additional mining as fostering good-natured competition with Vulcan Materials, an American-based company that’s in a legal war with CEMEX in Mexico. He dismissed the state gravel report that shows additional mining materials are not needed.
“Good for them,” he said about the state’s report on Fresno’s gravel surplus. “It’s good to have competition. It’s better not to have one company own all the gravel. That’s not a healthy thing.”