For Mines, Success Is the Pits
Riverside County’s mining barons have holed up for decades in the soft hills above Interstate 15, dynamiting hundreds of acres to extract the raw ingredients of concrete, roof tile and asphalt for construction across Southern California.
Now the stuff is being used to build new homes next door, and some of the pit kings feel as though they’re digging themselves into a hole with every shovelful.
“They’re moving in and trying to kick me out, but we’re providing the materials to build their houses,” Larry Werner, owner of Werner Corp. Sand & Gravel, said of his new neighbors -- so-called “active” retirees at the upscale Trilogy development.
“I do know there’s a rock quarry there,” said Mary Lou Luna, 56, who moved to Trilogy with her husband a year ago. “It gets a little noisy. You see the smoke.”
Neighbors such as Luna are Werner’s worst fear.
“We have the heaviest industry land use on Earth right here -- mining,” he grumbled. “Then they go and put the most sensitive land use on Earth right over the fence -- senior citizen housing. They call that planning!”
Until recently, there was always plenty of elbow room in the Inland Empire, and little known Temescal Canyon south of Corona was no exception. Wide open-pit mining, a landfill, a roadhouse saloon or two and a nudist camp have all co-existed in this alluvial valley bisected by I-15. Massive gravel, brick, sand and clay mining operations extract 20 million tons of construction materials worth an estimated $100 million from the hills every year, according to the Southern California Rock Products Assn. On one flank, Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Co., better known as the maker of 3M brand Scotch tape, extracts rare roofing material.
The average Californian requires more than 6 tons of concrete annually, between road repaving and home, school and mall construction, according to U.S. Bureau of Mines figures. The raw materials are found in plentiful supply locally, but residential development in coastal Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties has steadily shoved pit surface mining inland.
Temescal Canyon helped filled the void. A unique confluence of warm- and cold-water creeks, combined with eons of earthquakes and uplift of ancient ocean floor along the Elsinore fault, have sloughed tons of rock off the Santa Ana Mountains to the valley and foothills.
“It’s a pretty interesting and unique combination of mineral commodities,” said county engineering geologist Wayne Harrison, who said the rich deposits have made the canyon “the poster child of clustering” when it comes to mining.
“We have the finest supply of minerals west of the Rockies,” boasts Joyce DeLeo, whose husband, Jerry, owns Corona Clay, where material is manufactured for ball fields.
DeLeo is one of a dozen mine owners who have long considered “being a good neighbor” to mean hoisting a few dozen back-country residents over Temescal Creek in a bucket loader when it flooded in the springtime.
But these days, it’s hard to miss the signs of change. A welter of billboards crowds the freeway, exhorting wannabe home buyers. Huge grading machines scrape and level the land for row after row of wood frame houses. Shopping malls and condo villages are built atop abandoned quarry pits.
“It’s an emerging area, and we see big opportunities,” said Retreat developer Jim Previti, whose homes are selling for up to $1 million apiece. “A lot of people never would have dreamed of it five or 10 years ago.”
As Werner sits in traffic on the increasingly sluggish I-15, or glances over the chain-link fence ringing his vast surface mines, he remembers the fate of his father and other mine operators who were pushed out of Orange County a generation ago. With another 30 years’ worth of reserves left in the ground, he has swung into action, spending millions to try to hide his entire, behemoth operation.
He has hired sound consultants, built a 50-foot-high berm and covered it with large, dust-obscuring trees. He even won an exemption from federal regulators to allow his equipment operators to use a strobe light warning system at night if there is a problem in the pit, rather than a piercing whistle.”Our objective here is to encapsulate ourselves. The reality is the homes are coming. They’re already down front, and now they’re coming up the side,” said Werner. “We’re going to do our best to be good neighbors.”
There are new neighbors aplenty. The Inland Empire has added nearly half a million new residents in the last three years, and 2.5 million more are expected to arrive by 2030, according to planners. In Temescal Canyon alone, 22,000 new homes are under construction or on the drawing boards, according to developers and county planners.
Economists say it would be no great loss if mining were to go away in Riverside County.
“It’s not like Boeing picking up and going to Chicago,” said Stephen Levy, director of the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy in Palo Alto. “Western Riverside is a very prime area for housing, and this region is enormously short of housing.... Mining is not a big employer.” There are an estimated 1,300 mining jobs in the Inland Empire, out of 1.1 million total, according to state employment records.
Inland Empire regulators insist that even with the new development, they want the big digs to stay. “That’s an important resource for all of Southern California, so it’s not going away,” said Jerry Joliffe, deputy director of the Riverside County planning department.
But geologist Harrison, who thinks local mining is vital to keep down the costs of planned mega-highways and housing development, said public sentiment had already made it tougher for big miners in the county.
He said his office receives complaints regularly about air pollution and noise from rumbling trucks and dynamite blasts.
“Usually it’s someone new who says, ‘I just moved in next to a mine, and the Realtor told me they’d be leaving soon.’ I tell them, ‘Uh, no, they just got their permit renewed for 30 years.’ ”
Supervisor Bob Buster, who represents the area, said: “The idea is to keep the industry generally on the east side of the freeway and the residential on the west side. Generally.”
Werner’s mining operation sits on the west side.
“What am I supposed to do? I can’t pick up 100 million tons of gravel and move it across the road,” he said.
Werner insisted that Realtors at Trilogy, the retirement community, be required to disclose his existing, round-the-clock blasting operations to potential buyers. Still, people complain.
“One guy kept calling and calling, saying, ‘I just can’t sleep,’ ” said Werner. “We’re a new generation. We can’t do like they did in the old days and say, ‘Hey, we’ve been here 100 years. We were here first; go away.’ ”
If and when the mines do go, the land probably won’t sit vacant. On the east side of the freeway, Ali Sahabi skips across mountainous heaps of grimy “overburden” left behind by a silica mining company that tapped out its reserves.
Two quarry pits sat abandoned for decades, frequented mainly by high school daredevils who dove -- and sometimes drowned -- in their murky waters. Sahabi has cleaned them out and rechristened the site “Dos Lagos,” or “Two Lakes.”
He promises Dos Lagos will be a mixed-use community unlike anything the old Inland Empire has seen.
Where others see deserted decay and giant holes in the ground, Sahabi sees landscaped lakes, luxury housing, artists’ lofts and “big box” national shopping chains.
“This will be very high quality, with the lakes, the ambience, the landscaping we’re doing,” he promises, jumping around the huge mounds in business suit and fine leather shoes. “This will be very special.”
For Werner, the future lies in a different direction.
“The desert is next; that’s where the reserves are,” he said. “We’re out there already, and we don’t have anybody within two miles of us ... not a single house. We’re happy as clams.”
Harrison confirmed that a new cluster of mines is being unearthed in the hot sands near Indio.
But Werner is sanguine, knowing millions more Californians are expected to arrive in the next 20 years. “This is a big state, but you can’t go hide anywhere,” he said, gazing at a pump sucking out raw earth. “The reality is you’re going to have a neighbor sooner or later.”
