San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
BLAST ZONE
Hill Country quarries dump sediment into waterways, send dust into neighborhoods — with little regulation or penalties
Flat Creek had always been translucent, flowing clear and cold through Kathleen Wilson’s 15-acre spread in the Texas Hill Country.
Then something changed. The dust was the first sign.
“That was really the first noticeable thing, was the whole surface was covered with dust,” said Wilson, 63, who runs an eco-friendly bed and breakfast on the Blanco County property. “You’d stick your hand in and it would, like, stick to you.”
Soon, the water was choked with “mucky, nasty stuff,” Wilson said. “It was never dirty before. This is a spring-fed creek.”
The source of the problem: a limestone and caliche quarry 4 miles south of Wilson’s land, near the headwaters of the creek.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has tried and failed repeatedly to stop the quarry from polluting the water. Since the quarry opened in 2016, the environmental agency has cited its operator three times for the same violation: allowing sediment and rock to spill from its property, fouling the creek.
Twice, the quarry, known as the West Henly Site, said it had fixed the problem. Twice, the result was another spill. The TCEQ could have enforced its rules with a financial penalty but never sought to do so.
The creek has never been the same.
The pattern of repeat violations has played out again and again in the Hill Country, a treasured landscape of rolling hills, creeks, rivers, natural springs and striking rock formations across 17 counties.
Hill Country quarries have dumped sediment into waterways and sent plumes of potentially hazardous dust into neighborhoods, a San Antonio Express-News investigation
found.
The violations have spoiled pristine waterways and threatened the Edwards Aquifer, the region’s prime source of drinking water. Releases of fine particulate matter have coated cars and homes.
TCEQ enforcement actions can’t be relied on to halt problems. In at least nine documented cases in the Hill Country, the agency has failed to stop repeated infractions as earthen barriers meant to protect rivers have crumbled, dust has blanketed homes and workers have ignored rules put in place to prevent contamination of the aquifer.
Only in rare cases has the state levied financial penalties.
Inspections are infrequent. In the absence of complaints, the TCEQ will inspect a site once every two years in its first six years of operation, and just once every three years after that.
The public is left blind to the scope of problems.
If citizens check whether a quarry has violated state rules, they’ll often find nothing in TCEQ records — even if the quarry is a chronic offender. Under state law, the TCEQ removes any notice of a violation from a quarry’s five-year compliance history after a year has passed, leaving behind a spotless document even for sites with the spottiest records.
Quarries are authorized to discharge hazardous dust into the air as their operators blast, dig, move, crush and stockpile exposed rock.
To obtain an air permit in Texas, a quarry is required only to predict how much particulate matter a piece of equipment, such as a rockcrushing machine, will emit, and promise to control the dust and comply with federal air quality standards.
These calculations don’t account for other sources of air pollution on-site, such as the dust produced by blasting and trucks hauling rocks.
If a quarry says on a permit application that it will meet all required conditions, the TCEQ must approve the permit. In the past decade, the agency has denied just nine out of 4,523 applications for equipment at quarries.
The TCEQ doesn’t actually monitor air quality at quarries. The agency operates 76 regional monitoring stations, required by federal law, that measure particulate matter. They’re scattered across the state. The devices are not meant to measure emissions from any particular source. As a result, the TCEQ can’t document how much harmful material was released when dust from a quarry coats nearby homes.
‘Growing like crazy’
There are more than 1,000 active stone quarries across Texas. The number registered with the state has risen sharply in the last seven years, from 639 in 2013 to 1,056 in 2020.
Their operators clear away trees
and blast holes in the earth to dig up and crush rock for the construction of new roads and homes, all to keep up with booming growth as an average of 1,000 people move to Texas every day.
The $10 billion industry thrives in the Hill Country, where 142 quarries mine the region for its rich store of limestone and other resources. Bexar County has the most: 27.
Working night and day, the sites — known as aggregate production operations, or APOs — churn out towering mounds of granite, gravel, soil, sand, caliche and limestone piled across vast, man-made canyons that can grow to thousands of acres.
Some quarries operate next to creeks and rivers because that’s where the resource lies. The Hill Country is the most lucrative source in the state for limestone, a key ingredient in cement.
“There’s only a certain amount of rock in Texas, and it’s all in one location in the state where we can get good rock for these projects,” said Josh Leftwich, president of the Texas Aggregates and Concrete Association (TACA), an industry group.
“Texas in general is just growing like crazy,” he added. “The amount of infrastructure projects going on in the state has just spurred this industry a lot.”
Many quarries use hundreds of millions of gallons of water a year to control dust and wash rocks. In 2016, Martin Marietta Inc. used 1.3 billion gallons of water at its Beckmann Quarry, a 1,640-acre site in San Antonio next to Eisenhower Park, according to data provided by the Texas Water Development Board.
That’s more than twice as much water as was consumed in 2020 by all the H-E-B supermarkets, warehouses and other facilities served by the San Antonio Water System, according to the utility’s annual financial
report.
Some quarries recycle water, but that’s not required.
The state does require quarries to capture and treat stormwater before releasing it into waterways. But the sites are allowed to construct water control structures any way they see fit, often without rigorous engineering, according to a 2020 report by a Texas House
committee that studied APOs.
The TCEQ asserts that its permitting and enforcement rules are enough to protect human health and the environment. The agency said that in 2013, its inspectors documented at least one violation at 39 percent of the quarries they investigated, and that by 2020, the figure was down to 17 percent.
Over the same period, the TCEQ
said the number of investigations increased from 558 per year to 1,568, mainly because there were more quarries. In addition, the Legislature in 2019 required more frequent inspections — once every two years, rather than once every three, during a quarry’s first six years of operation.
When inspectors find a violation, the TCEQ requires the operator to “undertake all corrective action necessary to resolve” it, the agency said in a statement.
‘Scoured and eroded’
On a summer afternoon in Garfield, 17 miles east of Austin, Matthew Macon stood at his property line — right where it plunged 40 feet into the Colorado River.
Just a few years ago, Macon, his wife and their children had a backyard. Now, his back porch lay broken in the muddy water below. Their house, gutted and wrecked by floodwaters, clings to the edge of a cliff.
Macon bought the forested lot in 2005.
“I had land,” said Macon, 46. “I had a nice beach down there. I had a boat ramp that went to the water. That was really nice. You could walk down to the end and go sit down there, put your feet in the water, drink a beer, watch the sunset. In one year, we lost 90 feet — 2015 to 2016.”
Across the river from Macon’s property lies what is now known as the TXI Webberville Sand & Gravel quarry, which opened in 2002. Earthen berms separating the quarry’s mining pits from the river have failed repeatedly, allowing sediment-laden water to spill into the Colorado when it rains, TCEQ records show.
The problem has persisted for years — not just at the Webberville site, but at stone quarries across the state.
The TCEQ has long known about it.
In 2004, the agency embarked on its Clear Streams Initiative, a statewide effort spurred by complaints about the harmful impact of stone quarries on the Brazos watershed, which extends from Lubbock to the Gulf Coast near Houston.
The TCEQ found that “certain quarry operations had encroached close to the Brazos River or its tributaries and significant sedimentation from uncontrolled storm water runoff had resulted in increased turbidity and negative effects to the streambeds and watercourses from sediment loading,” according to a 2006 TCEQ report to the Legislature.
“At sites that appeared to be hav
ing the greatest impact, quarry activity was being conducted very near the river,” the report said.
In 2005, the year Macon moved into his house overlooking the Colorado, the TCEQ received complaints that the Webberville quarry was pumping water from a mining pit, and that its berms had altered the course of the river and caused erosion on the opposite bank.
An investigator found no violations and concluded that “natural river system dynamics” had caused the erosion but also noted that “river flooding” had damaged the quarry’s berms, requiring repairs.
In 2007, the TCEQ received another complaint that the quarry was pumping “muddy water” into the river, again causing the opposite bank to erode. This time, a TCEQ investigator found breaches in three berms at the site, as well as a “side channel” leading from a mining pit to the river.
“Water flowing from the pit into the river was turbid and a plume of sediment laden water was noted entering the river,” the investigator wrote.
The TCEQ also found that the quarry was pumping water from a mining pit through a pipe and into a creek that fed into the river.
The damage to the waterway was visible.
“The edge of the bank was scoured and eroded due to the high velocity of water exiting the pipe,” the investigator wrote.
Nonetheless, the TCEQ again concluded in 2007 that “natural river system dynamics” had caused the erosion. Development upstream — roads, parking lots and other impervious cover — had increased the volume of runoff, contributing to the problem, the agency said.
Still, the TCEQ cited the quarry for the unauthorized discharges and told it to repair the berms and stop pumping water into the creek. Later that year, the site’s operator told the TCEQ it had resolved the issues.
Martin Marietta Inc., a nationwide supplier of building materials, took over the quarry in 2014.
Another TCEQ investigation in 2016 found that berms separating old mining pits from the river “were not fully intact,” causing stormwater in the pits to flood the river repeatedly from 2009 to 2016.
Investigators that year could not inspect the pits because they were “inundated with water.” A quarry official could not provide the TCEQ any record of steps taken to prevent stormwater pollution at the site. A severe flood in October 2015 had damaged the documents “beyond repair,” he told the agency.
The same flood had pushed the Colorado River over the opposite riverbank and left a foot of mud inside Macon’s home. By 2016, he had lost his backyard to the water below.
That year, the quarry told the TCEQ it was not inspecting its berms due to “high water and other safety considerations” — a violation of state rules.
The TCEQ cited the quarry for failing to put into effect a stormwater pollution prevention plan and requested that it document how it would do so. In an email that year, a quarry representative told the TCEQ that the effort was “currently in process.”
The TCEQ could have elevated the issue to a notice of enforcement, a compliance tool intended for “serious or continuing violations.” A notice of enforcement authorizes the TCEQ to seek penalties to deter future violations, either through administrative action or a civil lawsuit. But no such action was taken against the Webberville site, according to its compliance history report.
Martin Marietta declined to comment for this article.
Despite its 2016 violation, the quarry has a perfect TCEQ compliance history from September 2015 to August 2020 — at least officially.
Anyone who requests a report for the Webberville quarry —