Grinding It Out

The workers at Curtis Sand & Gravel at times wonder aloud if the houses overlooking their nearly half-century-old quarry are harbingers of changing times.

“We all realize this isn’t a long-term situation here,” conceded Jason Curtis, the lanky 25-year-old yard-rock plant supervisor and scion of the family business where 60 workers scoop up the bone-white Santa Clarita River bottom during the dry season and grind it into more than $10-million worth of construction materials every year.

“But this is my life,” Curtis added, swinging into his pickup truck to lead a tour of the bustling 185-acre quarry and cement-mixing plant.

“When I come to work I feel like I’m coming home. We’ll just keep on doing it as long as we can.”

There’s an ironic tension between the quarry and its closest neighbors in a row of houses on Sequoia Road, a long tee shot from where rock processing machines sift and crunch gravel into piles, and where lumbering sand and cement trucks groan under multi-ton loads.

Residents in the 5-year-old Stonecrest tract don’t care much for the mine’s dust and appearance. “They’re an eyesore and we don’t want any more of them,” said one Sequoia Road resident.

But the building boom that pushed the homes within sight of the gravel pits is still going strong. And every new house built requires 14 tons of aggregate, according to gravel industry figures--plus 314 more tons per house for infrastructure, including public buildings, streets, curbs and sidewalks.

That’s why times are good at Curtis Sand & Gravel, said company President Ben W. Curtis, who runs the construction materials concern with his wife, Dianne, and two sons--the other one is Dale, 28, who supervises transportation at the bustling quarry.

Curtis pointed out another ridge farther east where even more houses within sight of the quarry are scheduled to be built, which promises to keep the work force busy.

The workers collect raw material from the river, grind and wash it into various grades of gravel and sand, fill daylong parades of 10-cubic-yard cement trucks and recycle more than 2,000 tons a day of demolition rubble into a marketable foundation material.

“It’s a comfortable family business,” said the lean and leathery Ben Curtis, a former Air Force band drummer, as he checked progress on a new $250,000 mixing plant under construction. The new batch plant is designed to nearly triple the company’s cement output, to about 300 cubic yards per hour from the current 125 yards per hour.

The company has grossed $10 million to $11 million annually in recent years, Curtis said, but he expects moderate growth next year with the addition of mixing capacity. “But there isn’t a lot of profit because of the high overhead,” the elder Curtis added quickly.

While Santa Clarita residents debate proposed expansion of mining operations elsewhere in the city’s sphere of influence, the low-tech operations at Curtis Sand & Gravel will continue much as they have since the early 1950s when, by local accounts, commercial mining of the Santa Clarita River began amid Southern California’s epic post-World War II building boom.

In 1968, the elder Curtis’ grandfather and two uncles moved a family construction company south from Spokane, Wash., to take over what was then A.E. Shirey & Son, acquiring several hundred then-remote acres that included a three-mile stretch of the riverbed.

Recently, Jason Curtis bounced over the gravelly dry stream bed amid the stark, largely vegetation-free landscape. On a stretch of river being worked, a single loader rumbled over the gravelly dunes, its driver expertly shaving away layers of gravel in a precise pattern to allow easy access to the entire quarry.

Debris from decades of dumping occasionally emerges from the river. Numerous old tires are scattered around the river. Workers occasionally uncover old appliances and even rusting car bodies. An entire Volkswagen turned up in a scoop of gravel not long ago. Employees said that when they show up for work on a Monday morning, they often find loads of household trash illegally dumped on the yard by passersby.

“People always ask us if we ever dig up human remains, but we never have, thank God,” Jason said with a chuckle.

The work is often hot and grimy, but drivers who do most of the digging spend their days in surprisingly comfortable surroundings. The cabs in most of the trucks and heavy earthmovers are equipped with spacious seats, air conditioning, advanced sound systems and heating compartments to warm up coffee or a lunch.

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Most of the workers--including about 30 drivers--report more than an hour before sunrise, getting an early start both to beat the heat and to get materials in the daily pipeline to construction sites.

“My job is to be able to run every piece of equipment in the yard,” Jason Curtis said, pointing out tractors, loaders, trucks of all sizes, the grinding machines and conveyor systems that transport the raw and finished products.

Dianne Curtis runs her own trucking company, Canyon Bulk Inc., which operates six tractors that deliver bulk materials.

“When I started in 1984 it was hard for a woman to get into the business,” she said. “My diesel suppliers wouldn’t give me credit. I had to pay in cash every two weeks.”

Diesel runs the trucks that haul the 500 tons or more of sand and gravel that leave the quarry on an average day. The fuel also runs generators that power stationary equipment, including the towering main rock crushing plant that churns out six grades of sand and gravel that go to market.

Gravel, mostly for mixing various types of cement, is provided in three sizes--from 3/8 of an inch to 1 3/4 of an inch in diameter. Sand is produced in three grades: so-called sharp grade for finished masonry work; a finer grind for plastering and grouting; and a coarser grade for such rough uses as fill under slabs.

The recycling operation is run as No Limit Crushing, a separate business that Jason and Dale started during cleanup after the 1994 Northridge earthquake. The heart of the recycler is a multistage grinding and separating plant with two powerful electromagnets that pull reinforcement steel out of the concrete--and yank the occasional wrench from the grip of workers who stray too close.

No Limit accepts concrete demolition debris at $20 to $250 per truckload and crushes it into a product called Class II crushed miscellaneous base, which sells for about $4.50 a ton and is used as a foundation under various pavement surfaces.

For about $20 a ton, Curtis also sells 2- to 4-foot diameter decorative boulders plucked whole from the riverbed, naturally polished and shaped.

But the company’s key product is ready-mixed cement, which Curtis markets for about $51 a yard. In a market where large-volume suppliers in the region sell the same material for $5 or so a yard less, Curtis trades on close attention to his customers, using automated dispatching and fast response on orders.

“We service smaller guys, the guys whose entire office is in their vest pocket,” Ben Curtis said.

The new batch plant will allow the company to bid on larger jobs that require faster delivery.

The new plant’s overhead also reflects another key cost for the firm: Workers were busy downstream last week building run-off catch basins to keep the excess water from cement mixing out of the river stream. Curtis said he wasn’t required to add capacity to his catch basins, but did so to provide extra protection for the waterway.

The Regional Water Quality Control Board that inspects the quarry to protect the stream--Curtis Sand & Gravel even shuts down mining during the wet months--is one of at least a dozen local, state and federal agencies that regulate Curtis Sand & Gravel. They include three mining agencies, the Army Corps of Engineers and state and federal wildlife agencies that monitor the unarmored three-spine stickleback, an endangered species in the Santa Clarita River.

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“They’re little teeny fish, 3 inches long, and you can see right through them,” Ben Curtis said. “We find very few of them out here . . . But we’ve helped their habitats by stopping the upstream encroachment of predatory fish and that sort of thing.”

But lately, the human neighbors have been on the minds of the Curtises’ staff.

“NIMBYism’s a problem for the aggregate industry as a whole,” said Steve Bledsoe, president of the South Pasadena-based Southern California Rock Products Assn. and the Southern California Ready Mixed Concrete Assn.

The trade group reported that the four Southern California counties consumed 60 million tons of sand, gravel and stone in 1998, the latest reporting period, with demand growing at least 10% a year. Bledsoe said the groups urge that the state regulate quarries and cement batch plants on a regional basis so that close neighbors aren’t given undue influence in long-term industry expansion.

“We try to point out to the Legislature that there are ambitious infrastructure plans in Southern California, in terms of freeway lane miles, the Alameda Corridor, LAX and the Long Beach Harbor, and they will all put a strain on the resources that are on line,” Bledsoe said. Industry studies suggest that costs of remote gravel operations are burdensome to the construction industry. The transportation costs can quickly add to aggregate material costs, which double for every 25 miles that the materials are hauled.

But even the industry realizes the transitional nature of gravel mining.

Ben Curtis, for one, believes the practical life of his mine will long outlive its political or economic life.

“We’re all in business to make money,” he said. “And as real estate becomes more and more valuable, we’ll end up developing the real estate--and quit fighting the agencies.”