Workers Know Little About Mine Project

Brian Brubaker’s and Vic Westerberg’s letters on Sept. 8, extolling the virtues of S.P. Milling’s Sycamore Ranch rock and gravel strip mining project near Fillmore, show how little they know about their own company’s project.

First, to open an ugly strip mine for rock and gravel in the orchards on their property, is like “placing a McDonald’s Logo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel!” But that is not the real issue with this problem project.

Ushered out of the Santa Clara River bottom for environmental reasons, S.P. Milling has moved up on the lower slopes of 4,200-foot San Cayetano Mountain right into the paths of two mountain torrents--Boulder Creek and the east fork of Lord’s Creek. These two torrents are sleeping giants and only 1,600 feet apart.

The mine pit is 105 feet above the Santa Clara River and will be there forever, 25 to 95 feet deep, including flood control berms. If flooded, its top 15 feet can hold 500 million gallons of water. This volume can all break out if a narrow earth ridge at its south rim were to erode and wash out. If the breakout occurred in a period of 1 1/2 hours, down through the east fork and Boulder Creek, the resulting flood peak would exceed the 100-year flood. Shades of the St. Francis Dam disaster!

Luckily, in a last-minute reprieve for the citizens of western Ventura County, the Division of Safety of Dams in Sacramento has undertaken the task of examining the safety of this dangerous project. To paraphrase the words of the O.J. trial: “If the mine pit doesn’t fit, there should be no permit!”

CLARENCE N. FREEMAN

Fillmore

* As S.P. Milling management, it is not surprising that Vic Westerberg and Brian Brubaker make an apparently airtight “factual” case for their Sycamore pit mine in the Sept. 8 Letters column. I believe that they do not adequately understand their own project.

They are not farmers. Our local farmers have heard their slick presentations over the last two years, and they still don’t believe that S.P. Milling can grow citrus at the bottom of a 25- to 90-foot pit, while mining continues in the pit. They have noticed that S.P. Milling is currently neglecting the trees on their land, both in the area to be mined as well as on their land that they say is never to be mined. S.P. Milling does not seem to understand what it takes to be a good farmer.

Neither are they engineers. Civil engineer Clarence Freeman has been saying for over a year that the sketchy designs they proposed to keep Boulder Creek and Hardison Ditch out of their pit are fatally flawed. Alex Sheydayi, of Ventura County Flood Control, finally agreed in August and rejected these plans.

S.P. Milling would have us trust them that after the project is approved they will somehow get it right. It defies common sense to dig a pit half a mile square and up to 90 feet deep between these two streams which are raging torrents in major storms. It will create a dangerous flood hazard which will exist forever.

S.P. Milling claims we will never notice the mine is there. Yet during its 1994 mining of Boulder Creek in the guise of “stream cleanout,” all of us who lived or drove near their property noticed how their 25-ton gravel trucks roared down Sycamore Road. They stirred up plumes of dust that coated their own trees as well as their neighbors’ and threatened the health of the trees and the biological pest controls of which this valley is proud.

S.P. Milling does not seem to understand what it means to be a good neighbor in our valley.

STUART FOX

Fillmore