Liberty Materials Sand Mine Built in Floodway, Floodplains, But Flooding Not Likely Cause of Breach
A Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) investigation into the mysterious white water on the West Fork, focused on sand mining upstream. TCEQ cited Liberty Materials for allegedly discharging 56 million gallons of milky-white water into the West Fork.
The mine’s manager said he “didn’t have a clue” about when, why, or how one of the mine’s pits lost 4 feet of water. A water sample showed nearly 25 times the normal amount of dissolved solids.
The Liberty Materials mine, like virtually all of the mines on the West Fork, sits in the floodway and floodplain. It’s a mile and a half wide and almost three miles long. About a 1000 acres altogether.
That’s a lot of sand and sediment exposed to the ravages of floodwater.
But the irony in this case is that there was no flood immediately before the breaches.
The gage at State Highway 242 near the Liberty mine shows 2.4 inches of rain during a 3 day period starting six days before the white-water incident.
That amount of rainfall caused the river to rise about 3 feet. But it was still 18 feet away from flooding!
Alternative Breach Scenarios
So if flooding didn’t do it, how did the water get out of the mine? One possibility is that the terrain funneled rainwater into the pond and caused it to overflow. The overflow then started a fissure which widened into the Grand Canyon of the West Fork.
Several mining engineers suggested other alternative scenarios:
- Industrial sabotage by a disgruntled employee
- Liquefaction of the sand around the perimeter of pits as they filled with rainwater
- A heavy truck driving over sand about to liquify
- They needed to clean out the pond and intentionally lowered the level
- Needed purer water to create acceptable frack sand
- “The Boss Made Me Do It”, possibly related to one of the two points above
I’m not saying there was a deliberate breach, but we’ve seen it happen before.
“Dunno What Happened!”
The mine manager interviewed by the TCEQ claims he doesn’t know when, why, or how the breach happened. Yet it caused a four-foot drop in the level of a major pond for more than a week.
To paraphrase the famous quote from Hamlet, “Methinks, the man professes ignorance too much.” By that I mean, the denials cause him to lose credibility. If your swimming pool suddenly dropped four feet, wouldn’t you want to know the cause?
His responses hint that something else is going on here. We may never know what. Despite tens of millions of gallons of pollution being poured into the West Fork, these cases rarely go to trial.
All the more reason to establish greater setbacks from rivers for sand mines.
The state legislature needs to make it more difficult for “accidents” like these to happen.
Posted by Bob Rehak on 12/2/2019
825 Days after Hurricane Harvey
