Busts in Hinton Mining robbery
Police say men had explosives
Las Vegas police have arrested two men in the theft of 240 pounds of commercial-grade explosives last week from a Southern Nevada mining business.
Sergio Bautista, 33, and Eric Golden, 54, both of
Las Vegas, are charged with conspiracy, burglary, grand larceny, possession of stolen property and possession of an explosive device.
Metropolitan Police Department arrest reports for both men said they were caught after 240 pounds of ammonium nitrate fuel oil explosives and sticks of ammonium nitrate Blastex were stolen during a burglary at Hinton Mining, which provides explosives for the PABCO Gypsum plant in the desert east of the Las Vegas Valley.
Bautista’s defense attorney, G. Oliver Melgar, declined comment. An attorney for Golden could not be reached for comment Thursday.
The arrest reports say police responded May 13 to a burglary call near the PABCO plant.
They were led by the owner of Hinton Mining to a property in the desert where the company’s storage facilities were broken into.
“When (the owner) went into the trailer, he noticed that one box of ‘Blast X’ was missing,” police said. “(The owner) stated that inside of
can communities, ranchers, rural governments and environmentalists, fought the project in court dating to 2006, going as far up as the state Supreme Court in 2010.
For many American Indians living in and around the valleys, the project was seen was a threat to their culture and very way of life. They and others expressed concern that disrupting the groundwater basins in the areas could harm culturally sensitive sites like the swamp cedars in White Pine County’s Spring Valley, a site considered sacred to the Shoshone tribes.
In what proved to be the final legal blow to the project, a District Court judge in March upheld a ruling to block the water authority’s plans to pump water from the valleys in White Pine and Lincoln counties, citing concerns that the allotments would prevent the basins from ever reaching equilibrium and result in the eventual depletion of the aquifer. The judge called the plan “arbitrary and capricious” and inconsistent with the state’s long-held rules on water appropriation.
The judge also overturned older rulings from the state engineer that had granted the agency the right to pump water out of the basins.
After the ruling, the water authority said the pipeline project would not be needed in its resource plan within the next 30 years and indicated it would not appeal the decision.
The water authority said Thursday its recommendation to abandon the project was based in part on successful conservation efforts and the completion of a new pumping station last month. The agency will close the books on the roughly $330 million spent on the proposal over its lifetime.
“The agency remains focused on efforts to increase water conservation within Southern Nevada and strengthening partnerships with other Colorado River water users to expand the community’s water resource options,” the water authority said in a statement.
Board member Justin Jones said during the meeting that he thought the project began with good intentions, but “over the course of the past 30 years, it has become clear that the project does not make sense, either environmentally or economically.”
Contact Blake Apgar at bapgar@ reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5298. Follow @blakeapgar on Twitter. Contact Capital Bureau Chief Colton Lochhead at clochhead@ reviewjournal.com. Follow @Coltonlochhead on Twitter.