Rock mining in Palm Beach County, by gimleteye

I know that many of our readers are waiting to hear what we have to say about the Lake Belt rock mining issue: you'll have to wait. But in the meantime, I will say this...

As Everglades restoration drifts further and further away, it is nonetheless astounding that the crash in housing markets has sent land speculators scurrying to convert vast tracts of open space in South Florida into rock mines for aggregate and limestone. Rock mining is an economic activity that leaves the public with a pittance in exchange for rights to excavate aquifers. It makes its shareholders part of one of the wealthiest and most secretive industries in Florida. (For more, read our archive, "rock mining".)

It seems to matter not at all that Governor Crist convened a State Aggregate Task Force, or, that the legislature in the waning days rejected an effort by the rock mining industry to lobby for a new bill that would "pre-empt" local authorities from permitting decisions on rock mines.

This is another example of an industry that commandeers the public interest running roughshod over long-term planning and the public commons. It is a disaster.

What Governor Crist should do right now is to intervene and instruct FDEP to halt all new rock mining permits in the Everglades Agricultural Area and areas bordering the Everglades until we know where we are going, with supply and demand, related to the economic needs of limestone for industry. That was the recommendation of the Task Force, blind-sided by a stampede of money that realizes it can no longer depend on tract housing as a wealth creator.

In Palm Beach County, Big Sugar has been working for years to open up its land to rock mining.

Here's an interesting blog post from the Palm Beach Post:

And here is an editorial from The Palm Beach Post that is deeply, deeply troubling.

Digging into the Everglades

By Joel Engelhardt

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

The biggest hole in the Everglades Agricultural Area does not belong
to a mining company digging for road-building materials. It belongs to
the government - the South Florida Water Management District - digging
to restore the Everglades.

It's also not a hole, actually. It's a ditch, an enormous, important
ditch. At 20 miles long and 100 feet wide at the surface, it's about
half the length and a fifth the width of the Panama Canal. That's big
enough to hold 4.8 million alligators, if you squeeze them on top of
one another, or, if you want to be mean about it, 9 million
environmentalists opposed to mining. That's assuming the
environmentalists aren't writhing, like the alligators.

Some mining opponents would like to bury water managers after their
disappearance during debate over Palm Beach County's recent decision
to allow commercial rock mines in the sugar-cane growing region. The
water district ducked far under the cover of its rules and studies to
avoid taking a stand on what could be this century's equivalent to
last century's decision to drain the Everglades.

The district, unlike the mining companies, does not have a profit
motive for blasting rock. It is digging this giant ditch to build an
earthen embankment 31 feet high and 200 feet wide at its base to
create the world's largest free-standing reservoir. It would be able
to hold 62 billion gallons of water. Or 61.99 billion gallons of water
and 1,000 writhing environmentalists.

In building the wall, water managers are thinking like rock miners.
They hired Barnard Construction and Parsons Corp., two giants in the
field, and promised two years ago to pay $400 million to create the
16,000-acre reservoir. An audit this year showed that the cost would
rise to $700 million, in part to meet more exacting hurricane
standards.

To build such a large reservoir from the fertile muck of the former
Talisman sugar farm requires blasting, which often makes
environmentalists wary. Workers must remove the muck soil, separate
the sand from the rock and process the rock. In three months,
Barnard-Parsons erected a rock processing plant in the middle of the
farming area that will be dismantled and carted away when the
reservoir is done.

Every bit of rock and sand Barnard-Parsons pulls from the ground must
remain on site, however, or the Talisman project would be subject to
Palm Beach County zoning control, like the commercial mines. By
keeping everything on site, even if the rock and sand could be sold
elsewhere for profit, water managers avoid the kind of zoning fight
that delayed mining companies for nearly two years.

Because of their restoration motives, the water managers likely
wouldn't be held up. The county commission's biggest fear over the
potential harm from commercial mines, an objection the mining lobby
overcame, was that letting miners work giant holes for decades could
limit Everglades restoration options. Since the commission never
really got a firm answer on that one, we'll have to find out later,
when it would be too late.

At 17 feet, however, the district's ditch is not as deep as the
commercial mines, which could go to depths of 80 feet. Commissioners
heard mixed messages on whether mining allows contaminants into ground
water and at what depth. For instance, some argue that shallow mines,
as have been proposed in western Martin County, aren't nearly as risky
as deeper excavations.

Sure, water managers have been digging canals in the remnants of the
Everglades for more than a century. They started with the intent of
draining the swamp to create an agricultural Garden of Eden. Those
19th- and early 20th-century profit-driven decisions allowed South
Florida to happen but caused the problems that water managers today
are trying to undo.

The Talisman reservoir, with its towering embankment and mighty ditch,
is an ambitious step toward restoring what's left of the Everglades.
Whether it will store enough water for both the environment and the
urbanized coast remains unknown. It better work, though. As commercial
mines move into the region, there will be fewer options for building
reservoirs, no matter how many environmentalists a reservoir can
drown.

Joel Engelhardt is an editorial writer for The Palm Beach Post. His
e-mail address is joel_engelhardt@pbpost.com