Landmark Carries on a Crushing Tradition
It is too immense, too noisy and too brutally awesome to be merely a machine. But the drab, decades-old Reliance plant in Irwindale is possibly the biggest and most imposing apparatus ever created for crushing rock.
Rising against the majestic backdrop of the San Gabriel Mountains, it stands 205 feet tall and feeds off the canted ends of conveyor belts that extend as far as two miles.
Jock M. Scott, who has compiled about 62,000 pages of archives involving the rock-and-gravel industry, said, “It’s the largest I’ve seen, and I’ve been all over the United States looking.”
The volume of sand, gravel and crushed rocks pouring through the plant exceeds 10,000 tons per day. Rotating crushers, resembling toy tops, grind big rocks into smaller ones.
Millions of rocks filter through long vibrating screens that sort them into desired sizes. They go tumbling down three floors of metal chutes with such a din that you have to wear earplugs to walk the plant’s lofty stairs and decks.
The chutes are manipulated to open and close, much as the pipes of a saxophone are regulated to direct a flow of air. The right-sized rocks have to be channeled into the correct concrete storage bunkers below.
The choreography is done in an automated room known as “the penthouse,” a seventh-floor crow’s nest crowded with ancient-looking metal tables fitted with mechanical buttons and dials.
It was considered a technological marvel in 1972, when the plant opened, because workers no longer had to open and close the chutes by hand.
Other parts of the plant also were innovative. Truck lanes and computerized scales were positioned directly under the bunkers. Trucks passing beneath the plant could be loaded with up to 25 tons at the push of a button and weighed at the same time. Invoices were issued simultaneously.
Though newer plants have incorporated those features, while running more quietly and efficiently, Reliance still ranks at the top in sheer size and among the leaders in daily output.
More than 400 trucks a day line up for materials used to build office towers, freeways and asphalt parking lots. Much of the material that is creating Pier 400, a huge commercial expansion of the Port of Los Angeles, is being hauled from Reliance.
Like an old battleship, the plant is an almost indestructible icon of years past, said Douglas W. Sprague of Vulcan Materials Co. The firm owns and operates the machinery on 178 acres north of the Foothill Freeway.
“You’ll probably never see a plant like this again,” he said.
Many are glad. The behemoth, once praised, is widely regarded as a symbol of what is wrong in Irwindale, a town struggling to change its noisy, dusty image.
Only 1,500 people live in the city, which was founded by the rock companies in 1957 to provide themselves a safe haven from neighbors and politicians who might object to their presence.
In the early days, quarry interests dominated the city and surrounding region. But the political dynamic has shifted as more and more homeowners and cleaner forms of commerce have moved to Irwindale and such neighboring towns as Azusa and Baldwin Park.
Irwindale is only 5 square miles in area, if you discount what lies beneath the waters behind Santa Fe Dam. Rock-mining pits consume two of those 5 square miles. Seventeen pits dot the town’s landscape like bomb craters. Many are more than 200 feet deep, including the steep, terraced hole adjoining the Reliance plant.
Some locals refer to their hazy town as El Jardin de Roca --”The Garden of Rock.” The more common nomenclature is far less poetic: “Pit City.”
Reliance is one of several tall processing plants visible from freeways and streets. They stand alongside the pits like oversized Erector Set creations. The amount of rock, gravel and sand heaped around them is difficult to grasp. At Reliance, a single pile contains 280,000 tons of sand.
Windy days become eye-stinging nightmares.
“When the wind blows, I compare it to the desert,” said Irwindale City Manager Steve Blancarte. “You can see [the dust] on car windows, see it on house windows.”
A parade of trucks rolls in and out of the plant sites. They tie up traffic. They damage roads. They slough off gravel and rocks. No one knows how many windshields have been shattered.
Irwindale has tried to offset the environmental damage in recent years by levying stiffer taxes. Its three major rock companies--Vulcan, Hanson and United Rock--have responded by filing legal actions. The war now simmers; officials from both sides express hope that negotiations will produce a settlement.
Even so, the city’s long-range goal--to phase out mining--clashes with the desires of the producers to dig for 30, 40 or even 50 more years. Los Angeles continues to need the materials, the companies insist.
“L.A. has literally come out of these holes in the ground,” said Sprague, Vulcan’s manager of special projects.
The rich alluvial fan of the San Gabriel River contains some of the world’s finest granitic and metamorphic rocks for making concrete and asphalt, said Don Dupras, a geologist with the California Division of Mines. “It’s all beautiful, concrete-grade stuff,” he said.
Because it is so costly to haul aggregate materials, Southern California may suffer a construction materials crisis similar to its electricity problem if mining in Irwindale is phased out too soon, Vulcan officials say. “With electricity, you can manipulate the grid and/or build a power plant in a couple of years,” said Steve C. Cortner, Vulcan’s vice president of resources. “With aggregate, that’s not going to happen.”
The debate will not go on forever, if only because reserves are dwindling. The Reliance site has been mined for a century. The amount of material left--an estimated 24 million tons--sounds like a lot, but it may last only 20 years.
The hulking plant will be gone long before then. Much of the reserves lie beneath it. To mine those rocks, the company plans to dismantle the machinery sometime in 2002 or 2003 and build a new, more efficient plant on the floor of the pit, out of public view.
Few figure to miss the old landmark, although it represents a long era of growth and prosperity, said Rick Cole, city manager of Azusa.
“The Reliance plant glows in the night in the same way that the steel mills of Pittsburgh [do],” Cole said. “It represents the past. It looks like something built by Stalin. It reminds us of a time when we sort of crushed nature instead of coexisting.”
