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Allied Stone Products has built stormwater containment ponds at its site.
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Goodwin: ‘There were a lot of fish. There’s not a lot of fish anymore.’
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‘wHAT HE’S DONE,
IT JUST MAKES YOU WEEP.’
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Friddle: ‘They don’t understand what it is to get out on that river at night and watch the stars ... .’
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‘we’ve got to force the landowners
and the operators to take responsibilitY.’
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Questions raised on quarry taxes.
Records reviewed by Fort Worth Weekly in recent weeks suggest that quarry landowners in Palo Pinto County may have been ignoring more than just environmental laws.
In Texas, landowners who maintain their land for agriculture uses -- like running cattle, growing crops, or keeping wild game -- are eligible for a hefty break on property taxes, worth hundreds of dollars per acre each year. Rock quarrying and crushing, however, do not qualify for the "ag exemption." Yet when faced with locked gates, busy tax appraisers may just observe from the road and take an owner’s word for how the rest of the land is being used.
A review of Palo Pinto County tax records indicate that several landowners apparently continued to claim an agricultural deduction on acreage long after it was converted to rock mining. Donna Rhoades, chief appraiser, and Christie Nava, agricultural appraiser, for the Palo Pinto Central Appraisal District, were both surprised to learn from the Weekly of quarries operating on lands the owners had claimed as agricultural. They immediately sought details, and by the next day were out in the field personally reappraising those properties.
Among the lands under scrutiny are those belonging to ThomBean (Dudley Mooney), who leases property to Osborn Stone, and Robert Treadwell, who leases to C&M Materials. The appraisers are also in the process of evaluating the site of Larry Barnett’s L&D Materials, and another previously unidentified operation, Santo Stone. Appraisal district officials said they will send letters to the landholders this month, notifying them of any reclassifications.
Quarries are legally obliged to pay full-fare taxes, which in Palo Pinto average about $600 per acre annually. Agricultural land is taxed at just $70 a year per acre. Landowners are required to notify the chief appraiser of any change in agricultural use, or face a rollback tax.
Continuing to claim the exemption once it’s no longer justified can be costly. In that case, according to appraisal district officials, the owner must repay the tax difference -- not just for one year, but for the past five years -- plus interest and steep penalties.
Those who wrongly classify their land could also be missing out on a legitimate tax incentive that could aid the river as well as the property owner. The state tax code allows tax abatement on land devoted to pollution prevention. Beryl Armstrong, a registered property tax consultant and naturalist with Plateau Integrated Land & Wildlife Management, said that, under that provision, an area along the river could be planted with natural grasses and left unquarried to act as a buffer zone to help filter the water before it gets to the river. {The more unstable the quarry area is, the bigger the size of the filter strip required.} Settling ponds, which drop the silt from the water before it reaches the river, may also fit the pollution prevention criteria. Any land approved by the state environmental agency for pollution control could potentially qualify for exemptions up to the full amount of tax assessed on that land, Armstrong said. -- Wendy Lyons Sunshine |
Mud Wrestling
High-flying seniors and an heiress want to save the Brazos from rock miners.
By Wendy Lyons Sunshine • photos by bill miskiewicz
If you are built like me, neither the certainty of change, nor the need for it, nor any wry philosophy will keep you from feeling a certain enraged awe when you hear that a river that you’ve known always ... will shortly not exist.
from Goodbye to a River
On a hot and glorious blue afternoon just west of Fort Worth, Tony Goodwin, 70, jabs a shovel into the moist bank of the Brazos River behind his home and dislodges a slick brown wedge of mud. The bottom layer resembles asphalt. "That’s decaying organic matter," says Goodwin about the black goo underneath, "It stinks."
The Mountain River Estates development where Goodwin lives has a sprinkling of trailers, A-frames, and brick houses nestled on half-acre lots. Homes closest to the water are on stilts, waiting for the next 100-year flood. The surrounding Brazos river valley and its landscape of peanut fields, pastures, and untamed ranch land are punctuated by gently rolling hills and rocky escarpments
As Goodwin surveys the river’s shallow expanse, a Great Blue Heron settles in a high branch on the opposite bank. The retiree doesn’t see as many fish-eating birds as he once did, probably for the same reason that human fishermen now stay away in droves. "We used to have deep pools here on this river," he says. "There were a lot of fish. There’s not a lot of fish any more."
Sandy Wilkins, a retired businesswoman who lives down the road, points at murky green clusters of submerged vegetation. Beyond them are reedy stalks poking from thickening patches of earth in the river. "There was never this vegetation before. It was all white sand and shifting sandbars," she says. "Now it’s all mud and islands."
Surely, this stretch of the Brazos can’t be the same pristine, dynamic river John Graves once traveled.
Yet it is.
In his classic memoir, Goodbye to a River, published in 1960, Graves paddled down the Brazos and contemplated the sprawling, harsh history of Texas traced by the waterway. His canoe journey was prompted by the threat of dams proposed in the 1950s, which would have erased much of the river forever. Most of the dreaded dams were never built, leaving the Brazos intact from the Possum Kingdom dam down to Lake Granbury, but decades later Graves’ graceful book is still in print. The text has become favored reading in universities, and even the teens who lead canoe trips out of the Boy Scout camp on the river must read it each summer.
Scouts paddling their stretch of the Brazos today, just below Possum Kingdom dam where Graves began his own odyssey, find conditions similar to those described in the famous book. Water levels vary depending on dam releases and rainfall. Overall this upper section of the river is clear and healthy, ripe with fish and shifting sandbars.
Downstream in Palo Pinto and Parker counties, near the homes of Goodwin and Wilkins, however, the scene is dramatically different.
Where once there were glistening sandbars of white crystals that rinsed easily off a boater’s feet, now the riverbed sticks to ankles like tar. Where water had flowed freely through deep channels, inviting catfish, bass, and minnows, now slower currents scrape broad shoals around muddy, vegetated islands. Few fish are left.
Lurking behind the river’s decline is an active market in Texas stone. Local rock quarries, many of which have sprung up unregulated and unpermitted, are stripping mountain caprock of sandstone and limestone, and exposing layer of fine clay beneath. Each rain further loosens the mountain, melting it like brown sugar and sending it straight into waters feeding the Brazos.
Goodwin, Wilkins, and other area seniors have rolled up their sleeves and set out to stop the mudslide. Their quest has involved airplane reconnaissance flights, calls to Austin, and complaints to government agencies. They have formed conservation groups, sought support from county officials, and begun testifying at hearings in Austin.
Because rock is not considered hazardous or toxic in itself, its mining isn’t closely monitored. Wildcat quarries operate in relative anonymity on secluded ranch land, without concern for wildlife habitat, dust management, or storm water runoff, until and unless some citizen group steps in to complain.
Battling quarry pollution means facing off against a regulatory black hole. No state agency has complete oversight over hard rock mining, and no one polices quarry pollution that slides into the river. The agency with some firepower, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, has historically been a better ally to polluters than to the environment.
But thanks to one key area resident who has taken their side, the conservationists are getting noticed. Alice Walton, ranked by Forbes magazine as the wealthiest woman in -- this is not a typo - the world, has joined forces with the Brazos River Conservation Coalition. When she talks, politicians listen.
"This is a huge issue for this region," Walton told Fort Worth Weekly. "I want to do what I can to help."
Since Walton became involved, TCEQ and the state attorney general have cracked down on one key offender, and shut down that mine. But the problem is even broader. At least three unregulated quarries have been identified in Palo Pinto County in the last two months, and airborne investigations by the BRCC suggest there are more.
These mines threaten to suffocate the beautiful, historic river from Mineral Wells down to Lake Granbury. Left unchecked, experts warn, mine runoff could turn the upper Brazos into a bayou.
"TCEQ is not enforcing. They have the ability to shut down these mines, but they’re not even looking, they’re not doing it," said Walton. "We’ve got to force the landowners and the operators to take responsibility, and that’s the real issue."
When one of the flagstone specialists wants to achieve special tone, he goes up to Palo Pinto country and brings down some slabs of red sandstone to dot here and there among the white. The result dazzles, as it’s intended to do...
-- from Goodbye to a River
As a country, we are ravenous for stone. We use it to clad our building exteriors. We adorn floors, walls, fireplaces, counter-tops, patios, and landscapes with it. We crush it and make it into roadways.
Michael Reis, editor of Stone World magazine, said that sales of natural stone -- quarried products like sandstone, limestone, granite, and marble -- have climbed at a steady 11 percent annually over the last seven years. In the United States, natural stone sales now total about $3.6 billion.
The upward trend continues despite a sagging domestic economy. Industry experts speculate that since real estate values have remained steady while the stock market is so volatile, people are investing more in their own homes. Stone is increasingly the building material of choice for middle- and upper-class homes, as well as commercial applications, like corporate campuses and restaurants, Reis said, because it gives a feel of permanence and quality combined with informality. "We’ve seen a lot of rough-faced stone use in country clubs," Reis said.
North Texas homebuilders are getting in on the action. Steve Myers, owner of Myers Custom Builders in Dallas, will be using stone in the $690,000 house he constructs for the Parade of Homes this summer. "There will be sandstones and two types of Granbury limestones," Myers said. "I’m using a blend called Southwest Full Color. It has greens, grays, blues, and mauve colors."
It’s no surprise that Texas businessmen and landowners have recognized that rocks buried in their own backyard can mean cash. Property holders who are willing to rip up their countryside can establish a quarry or lease acreage to mine operators and reap the rewards -- with virtually no government oversight.
Bob Popplewell came to Santo, in Palo Pinto County, in 1985, seeking a stretch of pristine wilderness to call home.
He found the ideal site off I-20, a craggy, tree-covered hillside with riverfront access, where he planned to keep snakes and turtles and open a camping operation. During the real estate transaction, he asked the seller, Dudley Mooney, what his plans were for an adjacent parcel, an unspoiled wooded bluff. Popplewell remembers being told: "That’s our private deer-hunting place. It’s beautiful, we’re never going to do anything with it." That promise, it turned out, was hollow.
Within a decade, Osborn Stone had set up shop on that land. They bulldozed the deer range and even tore 300 feet into Popplewell’s property line, right through his fence. "They took down every single tree on their property," he said.
With the quarry operations came scores of workers who scattered trash -- and worse. "We discovered about 50 piles of human feces along our hiking trails," said Popplewell. "All the employees were coming to our side to take a crap."
He and his wife, who own and operate the Brazos River Rattlesnake Ranch and Rivercrest camping resort, started a letter-writing campaign in the mid-1990s, hoping to get Mooney and Osborn Stone to clean up their act. Popplewell alerted the authorities to leaking diesel tanks and troublesome dust, but little action was taken.
The Popplewells did manage to get a health inspector out, who made the stone operation get Port-a-Cans, but Popplewell finally had to resort to "running off" the workers to fix the problem.
In the meantime, Osborn continued chipping away at the mountaintop. The operation created a hole full of rubble and exposed the sediments under the rock. Although a strong advocate of private property rights, Popplewell is outraged.
"Mooney has allowed that property to come down 25 feet from what it was," he said. Popplewell’s land once sat lower than the top of the bluff; now it is the top. "He has changed the face of the earth, literally," he said. "What he’s done, it just makes you weep."
The river has been affected, too. The fishing has gone to pot, and then there’s the mess. "If you had waded in our river five years ago and waded in it today, you’d see a dramatic difference," said Popplewell, whose business includes taking visitors out on the Brazos. Boating is less fun for everyone now that walking barefoot is so unpleasant. No longer sandy, the bottom is covered with clay that sticks to feet and catches seeds that drift down the river.
"There’s cockleburs and sunflowers and a profound amount of plant life on the islands," he said. "The clay has adhered and created a gumbo-like effect. It fights the process of water flow and cleansing."
Popplewell eventually wearied of fighting. He used to go down to the river every single day; now a month can pass without him visiting it.
The terms of today’s human beings are air conditioners and suburbs and water impoundments overlaying whole countrysides, and the hell with nature except maybe in a cross-sectional park here and there...
-- from Goodbye to a River
"I identify with John Graves in my love for rivers in their natural state," said Dr. John Calder, who used to practice dentistry in North Richland Hills. "One thing I seek rivers for is solitude and getting away from the world. I worked in little enclosed rooms most of my life, moving as fast as I could move and taking care of people. ... When I was practicing real hard the river afforded me a place to go where I had no intrusion. I didn’t bring a radio or a clock. I hated to even think about being on time."
Calder has been fishing the Brazos for nearly 50 of his 80 years. To be near it, he retired to the same Mountain River Estates development where Tony Goodwin and Sandy Wilkins live.
About the time that Calder finished putting in a concrete boat ramp on his property, river sedimentation made it impossible to use. "The area where I ended my ramp is filled with mud and I cannot even launch my airboat," he said. Worse yet, "there’s no fish. ...If there are, I haven’t seen them."
More than a year ago he started discussing the river’s deterioration with Goodwin, a retired hospital administrator. Together they scratched their heads over what had caused it, and how to stop it.
Help arrived by accident.
In late spring of 2003, the Association of Engineering Geologists planned a field trip to a geological outcropping nearby. The trip leader, geologist Bob Traylor, came knocking on Calder’s door one day, seeking permission to bring his group on the private lands.
When the homeowners learned that Traylor worked in a consulting capacity for the Texas Commission of Environmental Quality, they sought his expertise. He explained why the Osborn mine poses such a threat to the river and showed the neighbors how to approach the bureaucratic regulatory process.
"He’s been an awful lot of help to us," said Calder.
Every river is a dynamic system, with fluctuating water flow and silt continuously traveling downstream. Erosion is part of the long-term natural process. But dumping a crumbling mountain into one portion of the waterway skews the natural equilibrium.
The fine, dark clays like those in the deepest layers of the Osborn mine can rapidly affect a river. Easily swirled up in rainwater, they soon get deposited in the riverbed and slow the flow of water and sediment. Rich in mineral content, the clays mix with sand and organic debris to create a sumptuous potting soil.
Christopher Mathewson, a professor of engineering geology at Texas A&M University, compares heavy river sedimentation to a rush hour traffic jam. If water can’t get through the main river channel because it is clogged with quarry sediment (the main highway at 5 pm), it will find shortcuts that are slower (side streets). The more clogged the river gets, the slower all the water goes, the wider it spreads, and the more small channels that are carved by the water. "It changes the hydraulics of the system," explained Mathewson.
As a result of heavy quarrying along the Brazos in Palo Pinto and Parker counties, natural river dynamics are transforming this section into a giant mud flat.
Buoyed by the geologists’ input, the neighbors along the Brazos pushed for help. Response by TCEQ was agonizingly slow, however. Hoping for greater strength in numbers, the neighbors formed the non-profit Brazos River Conservation Coalition.
To make their point, they needed strong proof that the Osborn quarry was behind the river’s deterioration. So local cabinetmaker Ted Friddle, 63, offered the services of his 1957 Cessna 172. Traylor and Calder joined him on the first flight, using digital cameras to capture aerial shots of the river and landscape surrounding the quarry. Afterward, older geological mappings of the same area were overlaid with data from the new pictures. The evidence was damning. Waterways closest to the quarry were thick and clogged with dissolved clay and growing islands.
Meanwhile, BRCC president Tony Goodwin had gotten "nervy" and invited a wealthy neighbor who owned a cutting horse farm along the river to get involved.
Forbes magazine ranks Alice Walton, 57, daughter of the late discount store magnate, as the sixth richest individual in the world, just five slots behind Bill Gates. She is the wealthiest female anywhere, having unseated her own mother in the lineup -- perhaps as a side benefit of the daughter’s move to Texas, an income-tax-free state.
"I was so busy showing and running this ranch, and I hadn’t gotten down on the river in a couple of years," said Walton, in her distinctive throaty voice. "When Tony called me, it was the first time I got down on the river in those sections."
Walton tried to take her yellow rubber raft out on the Brazos for some fishing last fall, but gave up in frustration. It was easier to drag the raft than float it. "The river is three inches deep and you can’t go down it," she said. "It’s totally unusable for recreation, where it used to be a great asset. I was just shocked."
Walton considered the Brazos’ condition critical enough to make a phone call to Gov. Rick Perry. "We’ve got to do something about it quickly," said Walton, "because it won’t take long to ruin this river. It’s a huge recreational resource and we’re going to lose it."
Suddenly the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality came running.
The dirty water washes down
Poisoning the common ground
Taking sins of farm and town
And bearing them away...
-- from the song "Goodbye to a River" by Texas-born pop star and environmental activist Don Henley
Austin has a history of clapping businessmen on the back and winking at their dirtying of Texas’ land, air, and water. A bold review of the agency by the state auditor’s office last year described the pattern of regulatory weakness, which environmentalists have been complaining about for years. The December 2003 report noted that the agency violates federal law by hindering public comment at hearings, and does not effectively discourage pollution in the state. Businesses typically find it much cheaper to pollute and pay the fines than to fix the problem.
Citizens speaking at an enforcement hearing in Arlington in March echoed that opinion. They gave example after example of how TCEQ had failed to actively seek out or adequately punish polluters. Sentiment was that TCEQ addressed a problem only if goaded into action by a citizens’ complaint, and even then was painfully slow to respond. For example, for toxic air emission complaints, investigators often showed up at the site weeks later, long after useful evidence had drifted away.
Tony Goodwin spoke at that hearing. He expressed his outrage that members of the Brazos River Conservation Coalition were obliged to fly their own airplanes to monitor runoff from rock quarries, because the TCEQ would not do it.
In fact, TCEQ does not aggressively oversee quarries or rock crushers from either the ground or the air. So it was that complaints from the riverside neighbors triggered TCEQ’s visit to Osborn Stone on Dudley Mooney’s property in the summer of 2003. That visit led to a citation for discharging stormwater without a permit, and instruction to implement best management practices.
It took months for Osborn to finally submit a check for the $100 permit fee and file an incomplete version of the required paperwork. By the end of October 2003, a TCEQ inspector found no pollution controls in place and no storm water pollution prevention plan. Osborn continued to pour sediment into the Brazos.
Just about that time, Alice Walton whispered in the governor’s ear. On Nov. 5 and 6, TCEQ investigators returned to do a third assessment. They photographed an array of problems. Silt fencing that might have prevented dirty water from reaching the river was collapsed in some areas and improperly constructed in others. One section looked as if it were held up by clothespins, barely reaching the ground. Rubble had been plowed into rough retaining mounds, or berms, just 200 yards from the river. There were virtually none of the required settling ponds.
The report pointed out "heavily silt-laden discharge," or thick cloudy water, that poured off the quarry and into the river and its tributaries. Soon after, Texas Attorney Gen. Greg Abbot issued a temporary restraining order on behalf of TCEQ, stopping all quarrying and stone removal operations at the site.
In December, Osborn produced a stormwater plan and was allowed to resume operations. But by February, inspection after a big rainfall revealed that the new approach had failed.
Two months ago, Larry Mann, owner of Osborn Stone Company, and Dudley Mooney (doing business as ThomBean Inc.) were enjoined from operating the quarry. They were ordered to hire an environmental consulting firm to examine the problem and to propose modifications "to effectively control the discharge of silt and sediment and other pollutants to the Brazos River." A May 17 trial date is set.
Late in March, attorney general Abbott accepted Alice Walton’s invitation to visit. He joined her for a helicopter ride over the area, to see first-hand the destruction caused by the rock mining.
"I was just very impressed with Attorney General Greg Abbott," said Walton. "He is a very intelligent guy and comprehended the situation very quickly. He cares about doing the right thing."
Landowner Mooney refused to give detailed comments on the case, stating only that he was going to do his best to "make it right." Osborn Stone owner Larry Mann did not return calls seeking comment.
Quarries are pissing off a lot of Texans.
A few miles west of Weatherford, Larry Jones runs cattle and bails hay on a 150-acre ranch not far from where his great-grandfather used to teach in a tiny settlement schoolhouse. His property backs onto the river for about half a mile. The view was lovely until two separate quarries began scalping sections of the hilly horizon.
To the west is Vulcan Materials, a limestone crusher. A few miles east, Allied Stone Products digs up blue gray sandstone. What troubled Jones first was the constant blasting. "It would shake your house like an earthquake," he said.
More than two years ago, Jones organized the Southwestern Parker County Environmental Coalition and arranged a town meeting with representatives from the quarries. A Vulcan official said the company wanted to work in harmony with the locals, even to adjust the timing of the blasts -- and has since followed through on the promise. It didn’t hurt that local elected officials with a say in road building contracts, encouraged the aggregate producer to do right.
By contrast, Jones recalls the Allied manager announcing that his company was doing nothing wrong, and it would be business as usual. That manager has since been replaced. Gabe Sterling, manager since January 2003, told the Weekly that "We want to be - and we feel we are -- environmentally friendly and we want to be proactive in any concerns that the neighbors have."
Yet in October 2003, months after Sterling was on the job, TCEQ cited Allied for operating without a stormwater permit. Sterling said he’d started the permit process months earlier, but ran into delays with a consultant. In December, TCEQ investigators also found improperly handled oil containers and lack of spill prevention procedures. Sterling considers the issues found in December to be relatively minor.
All the issues have been addressed, and TCEQ has since found Allied in compliance. The company has built a series of settling ponds that treat most of the water coming off their quarry -- and is hoping to be invited to the BRCC’s next meeting.
The river nearby has worsened significantly since the Southwestern Parker County Environmental Coalition got started. "It was not near to the condition it is today," said Jones, 60. "A lot is due to Allied, Osborn, and other quarries."
The riverbed, once covered with sugary sand, Jones said, now has mud and slime layers that smell awful. Most of the fish are gone. "It’s just a nasty mess thanks to greedy, unscrupulous rock miners," he said. "They have no regard for anything other than making money. They have the right to mine. They don’t have the right to destroy the river; that’s public property. It’s criminal intent, to my way of thinking."
Rock miners aren’t too popular in the Hill Country, either.
In eastern Travis County, homeowners have watched their properties devalued by the encroaching rock crushers. Angry Webberville residents actually voted to incorporate, hoping to prevent the mammoth Trinity Materials Inc. and Texas Materials from spreading further.
In the town of Burnet alone there are about a dozen quarries and rock crushing operations within a 15-mile radius. Driving from Lampasas to Burnet to Marble Falls, past a string of quarries, travelers find their cars and the oak trees along the road shrouded with fine white dust. According to William Scott, spokesperson for the area’s state senator, Troy Fraser, this "begs the question of what TCEQ does to monitor the cumulative effect of all these facilities."
Fraser has proposed legislation to control air quality problems stemming from the quarries. The powerful rock-mining lobby squelched his last bill, but the issue is not dead. Perry appointed Fraser chairman of an advisory committee to examine rock mining and TCEQ’s role in its regulation.
"Quarries in and of themselves are not regulated, which raises a question by itself in the minds of the chairman of the committee and some committee members," Scott said.
During the committee’s first hearing, discussions focused on blasting, air quality, and groundwater issues. There was no consideration of the Brazos and its sedimentation problems. That will change at the next hearing, when BRCC members are scheduled to testify before the committee. Alice Walton plans to attend as well.
With a box gushing refrigerated air (or warmed, seasonally dependent) into a sealed house and another box flashing loud bright images into jaded heads, who gives a rat’s damn for things that go bump in the night?
-- from Goodbye to a River
The Brazos and its banks have sheltered creatures that slither and swish and go bump in the night since long before the Comanches camped on its bluffs.
One reptile native to the waterway is the Brazos water snake. Non-venomous, it has a double row of splotches along its brown-gray back, and can grow up to three feet long. Andy Price, herpetologist with Texas Parks and Wildlife Department said these snakes are only found along this river and in a few nearby lakes, from Palo Pinto to above Waco. Young ones, especially, rely on mildly turbulent river shallows, called riffles, to catch small fish. Sandbars are important for warming themselves between meals.
Snake lovers are concerned that sedimentation has reduced the snake’s habitat and populations. It was already listed as threatened by the state before the recent quarrying problems. State listing, however, won’t guard a species’ habitat; the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has to be involved for that.
No one has yet petitioned the feds to protect the snake, so it has thus far been ignored. But two different Brazos minnows have reached the short-list for endangered species listing. The black-capped vireo and golden-cheeked warbler songbirds have made it to full federal endangered status. But that status offers little benefit on private property. Landowners are expected to consult with wildlife authorities before bulldozing chunks of ranch property into a quarry, but in Palo Pinto and Parker counties, frankly, nobody is doing much consulting.
Celeste Brancel, who handles rare wildlife resource reviews for the state wildlife agency, found no record of any landowner in those counties having requested an environmental review for a quarry site. Omar Bocanegra, who has been issuing endangered species permits for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for five years, said he hasn’t gotten a single application from Palo Pinto or Parker counties.
Mike Merida, special agent with the Fish and Wildlife law enforcement division in Fort Worth, said it’s tough to make a case against scofflaw landowners. Once the land has been ripped up, it’s hard to know how many of the endangered animals lived there. "If you have a dead body, it’s easy to prosecute. When you have trees or habitat destroyed, it gets more difficult," he said. "If the public has any concerns, we’d love to hear them, because that’s how we get a lot of information."
The BRCC and Alice Walton have considered pursuing the wildlife angle, if that’s what it takes to stop the quarrying.
"If we can get TCEQ to do what they should do in terms of enforcing the Clean Rivers Act and policing the Brazos," said the heiress, "then maybe we don’t have to resort to the use of the Endangered Species Act or involve the federal government."
No one keeps a registry of Texas rock quarries or closely watches their impact on rivers. The General Land Office cares only about public property, the Railroad Commission focuses on coal mining, and the Parks & Wildlife department has some jurisdiction over streambeds. The Brazos River Authority (BRA) just sells water.
"Our role is strictly monitoring; we have absolutely no enforcement capabilities," acknowledged Tiffany Morgan, environmental planner for the river authority. "All the enforcement is legislatively granted to TCEQ."
Every three months, BRA sends a technician out to test water on the upper Brazos. One test, for total suspended solids (TSS), measures how much sediment is in the water.
The tests show no increase in solids, but that’s because monitoring is done just four times a year, independent of the weather. "Those suspended solids cloudy up the water but because they’re heavy, over time they’ll settle to the bottom," Morgan said. "So if we take a water sample, unless we happen to be scheduled on a day when they get rain, we’re probably not going to catch those solids."
Goodwin is encouraging the BRA to step up such testing. He’s considering pursuing a joint state-federal "wild and scenic river" designation for his part of the Brazos, or possibly an inter-county pollution control program. In the meantime, Ted Friddle continues to fly reconnaissance missions, scouting new quarries that threaten the river.
Near Mineral Wells, the group is watching L&D Stone Materials Ltd., established in 2001 by Larry and Debbie Barnett. The millionaire Barnetts own LAB Land & Cattle Inc. and are involved with several business ventures, including the Hills of Monticello development in pricey Colleyville. They did not return the Weekly’s phone call. The BRCC says that a recent flyover of the L&D site showed a tributary creek bulldozed with overburden from quarrying. The group filed a complaint with the state, but TCEQ would not discuss its status.
"We don’t give that information until it is complete," said TCEQ Region 4 Director Frank Espino. He did suggest that the agency has started keeping its eyes open more. "As we’ve been out there monitoring -- the Osborn site specifically - we have seen other quarries," said Espino. "When we’ve seen them we’re going out and investigating them to see if they have storm water control compliance."
Apparently the agency spotted C&M Materials in Santo, and cited it in February for operating without a stormwater permit or control measures. That report lists Richard Marino, a former supervisor for Osborn Stone, as C&M co-owner. Robert Treadwell, owner of the quarry land, said that as of April the company had disbanded and discontinued operations on his property. Treadwell denied that the quarries are having an effect on the river.
"I’m 42 years old and I’ve been on the river all my life, and I’ve sunk up to my knees in mud before there was ever a rock quarry in Palo Pinto County," he said. "There might be a little bit, but the first 10-inch rain comes along and it will all be washed out. Everybody is just trying to just blow this out of proportion, because of that one deal on the river."
Treadwell said that north of Possum Kingdom Lake there’s just as much mud in the river, without any quarrying nearby. "When that river sits still for a long period of time like it has, it just acquires a bunch of mud from still water sitting still."
Goodwin, Jones, and the other conservationists are deeply grateful to Alice Walton for her efforts to protect their beloved river, dubbed by Spanish explorers "Rio de Los Brazos de Dios," or river of the arms of God. They consider Walton the river’s fairy godmother.
"The public needs to have access to this river and enjoy it; it’s a state treasure," said the Arkansas transplant who has been canoeing and camping since she was two years old. "I love it out here and I love this river and that’s the only reason I’ve gotten involved."
"I don’t want to destroy the rock mining industry. We need rock, we need sand, we need gravel. I just want it done in a place where it doesn’t do this kind of damage," Walton said. "Let them get the stone where it’s not going to destroy a state treasure. If they have to pay a little more for it, let them pay. Destroying the state’s river is not the right price."
During the Weekly’s visit to the river, pilot Friddle was taciturn. But when conversation turned to urban dwellers’ understanding of the river’s desecration, he became outspoken, his words echoing those of John Graves.
"They don’t understand what it is to get out on that river at night and watch the stars ... listen to that river rumble down ... build a little campfire there, eat some fish that you caught the night before, do a little hunting," Friddle said. "There’s nothing any better."
John Graves no longer frequents the upper Brazos, site of his famous canoe trip. But he does visit closer to home. "I go out and check it every week or so, just to take a look," the author said. "Not as often as I used to. I’m getting pretty beat up in the legs."
Released this month, Graves’ new memoir, My Self and Strangers, traces his life from the late 1940s and culminates with the writing of Goodbye to a River. The author’s voice revealed a hint of Texas limestone as he spoke to the Weekly from his Glen Rose home.
Graves said that when he visits the Brazos downstream of Lake Granbury lately, he has noticed less river flow. "It’s not pulling nearly as well as it used to," he said. "That is in large part a subtraction of flow for the power plants down here."
The author, inducted last week into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame, cares deeply about the state’s environment. But not everyone shares his priorities.
"There are so many people living so high and demanding so much from the natural world, that it is hard to be optimistic about the future," he said. "I don’t like getting old. I’m 83 years old, but I’m glad I was born when I did, because I saw things less diminished by the growth of population and so on."
Still, he calls it a hopeful sign that people like Walton and Goodwin and the Brazos coalition are weighing in, and may be able to stop the destruction. "This wasn’t true many years ago when I wrote that book," said Graves. "You know, rivers were just there to use as anybody wanted to. The consciousness of their fragility has grown ... and that’s a good thing."
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