A multinational mining company with a litany of environmental violations seeks Fresno County’s blessing to blast a 600-foot deep pit near the San Joaquin River, 3 miles before California’s second-longest waterway flows into its fifth-largest city. … CEMEX’s proposal is an atrocity against Fresno’s greatest natural resource, already scarred by a century of gravel mining the company previously agreed to wind down, and should have been rejected point blank. Undeterred, county planners and hired guns spent five years preparing a draft Environmental Impact Report for the so-called Rockfield Quarry Modification Project. Modification? They want to dynamite hundreds of feet below ground in close proximity to one of the country’s most endangered rivers.
–Written by Marek Warszawski, opinion writer for The Fresno Bee.