The Frac Sand Frisbee

At last, spring is finally arriving here in Buffalo County.  And what would spring be without some frac sand ruckus to report?  Plenty of updates to the Mines page this morning.

A new mine — River Valley Sands

The Moratorium concluded at the end of April and sure enough, we’ve got a brand new application submitted.  Here’s a link to the application submitted by River Valley Sands and here’s a link to the Adjacent Property Owners Notices they submitted with the app.

The promoter behind this project is a fella from Minnesota who owns a trucking company — and this project is a trucker’s dream come true.  The haul routes (either through Gilmanton and Nelson on their way to Wabasha, or down to Winona) are super-long.  So the farmers will make the usual buck-a-ton and the truckers will rake in the chips — 200 loads a day, 1.5 million tons a year.

Oh, and it looks like there’s about 6 MILES of conveyers needed in order to connect all the parcels in the project.  Here’s a map of the mine location and those haul routes (you can click on the map for a bigger version).

Seven Sands is back

Yep.  You may recall that the Glacier Sands application for this monstro mine was denied last year.  And if you’re really paying attention, you know that they filed an appeal of that decision.  What you’ll want to know is the latest news — they’re requesting that the judge put their appeal on hold so they can go ahead and submit a new application.  Pretty much in the “have your cake and eat it too” department.  If their new applications win, they’re all set.  If they’re denied, their appeal rises from the grave and they continue to fight.  Click HERE to read the letter they sent to the judge asking for cake.  I sure hope he denies their request.

Starkey Wash Plant is coming back too

This one’s still in the “trending rumor” department, but the information is pretty solid.  The first clue is that Seven Sands motion just above.  But lots of reliable sources are telling me that the REASON that Seven Sands application is coming back is because Glacier Sands really wants to bring the Starkey Wash Plant back around too.  Other contributing bits of information — word has it that the leases on that land have been renewed, plus lots of people have seen the Glacier folks poking around on the properties.  Makes sense, since Glacier Sands had a lawyer in every single County Board meeting, making sure that our new sand mining ordinance was gutted by our County Board.

So boys and girls, it’s time to start getting ready for some spring cleaning.

Hi all,

We filed the next big document in the R&J lawsuit today.  Here’s a link — it’s a pretty big PDF so be patient.

O’Connor Memo in Support of Reversal Upon Certiorari Review

I’ve been puzzling about frac sand stuff here on Frac Sand Frisbee for about a year, and it seems like it’s time to try to figure out a path towards some middle ground.  So I built me a model that I can use to both describe the problem (as shown in this first picture) and start describing a path out of it (in the second picture).  Then I made a 25 minute video that narrates all that for you.

Let me set expectations.  This is not an official position of anybody — drawing and exploring models like this one is just a thought exercise that I often go through when working on a hard puzzle.  So I’m pretty sure it’s not right (models are like that — they often miss something critical) but it’s a start.

I hope you’ll watch this and then maybe share it with some friends, or a group of friends, or a meeting.  It’s a conversation-starter, that’s all.  It’s got some ideas for things to do, but those may be wrong too.

All I know for sure is that leaving things the way they are is going to be unsatisfactory for everybody.  I’m hoping we can start working on a different approach.

Click HERE (or on the thumbnail) to watch the video.

Several friends encouraged me to drive up Sand Road and take a gander at the Segerstrom mine.  Remember how mine promoters were telling us how they weren’t going to mine up by the bluff line because that’s not the area they were interested in?  The pictures tell the tale. Click on the pictures for the full-sized versions (yep, there’s a full sized backhoe in there).

Funny thing about that mine — they don’t have a place to haul their sand yet.  They aspire to have it go to Wabasha, but that’s a ways off.  Wait till they start hauling.

Update

Photo info — Taken with Marcie’s Panasonic Lumix FZ150, 3 bracketed shots +/- two F-stops, HDR combined photo using Photomatix Pro.

Distribution license: Creative Commons Attribution.

My goodness.  It’s only been a year since the first post here on Frac Sand Frisbee.  What a year it has been.  Not being a big one for reflection about the past I’ll leave it at that.  But to commemorate FSF’s 1st birthday, here’s a neat video.

I’ve been hoping to follow a semi over the Praag Valley dugway (Highway 88 just north of Laehn Ridge Road) ever since I started obsessing about this issue.  For me, the safety of that road was the core issue that got me into this conversation in the first place.  I finally lucked out last week — a truck came in right in front of me, my phone was charged up, the light was right and I didn’t crash my car keeping up with the driver of the truck.

Somewhere in the spring the Wisconsin DOT did a preliminary study that indicated that there are geometry issues with that segment of Highway 88, so what you’ll see in this video should come as no surprise.  There is no way that any driver, no matter how skillful, can take a truck over that piece of road without either crossing the center line or going on the shoulder — that’s the geometry issue the DOT is talking about.  The road has curves that are too sharp for semi trucks.

Combine that with the steep drops and lack of guardrails and you have a recipe for bad news.  There’s no room for error — no “flinch” room to quote a member of the DOT staff.

I’m really glad I could finally get actual video of this.  Imagine this fellow coming around a corner and confronting a combine, or an RV, or a group of motorcyclists.  There’s nowhere to go.

Happy New Year — see you again in 2013.

Mikey

Hi all — there’s a Zoning Committee meeting coming up this Tuesday and our County is moving along with a “do the minimum” approach to addressing the work they’re supposed to be doing during the Moratorium.  Here is the draft application they’re getting ready to review.

This kinda reminds me of the way I used to do homework for school. 

Chairman Twidt and County Board Supervisors,

As a group of Buffalo County citizens concerned about the impact of nonmetallic mining and & operations in our county, the Buffalo County Defenders would like to express appreciation for the recent passing of Ordinance 2012-10 – 02, Extension of the Nonmetallic Mining Ordinance Moratorium, by the Buffalo County Board of Supervisors.

However, we are concerned that the County will reach the end of this extended moratorium and still not be prepared to manage and administer the impending silica sand industrial mining impacts on our county.

We request that a Moratorium Status Update be added to the agenda of each regularly scheduled meeting of the Buffalo County Board of Supervisors throughout the extended moratorium period.

We request that a Moratorium State Update be added to the agenda of each regularly scheduled meeting of the Zoning Committee, Health and Human Services Committee, Highway Committee and Agriculture Extension-Economic Development Committee.

We request, as an item of the County Board of Supervisors monthly meeting agenda, that the Supervisors inquire about progress concerning silica sand mining and operations during the extended moratorium period to include:

• Conformation that the Zoning Committee is meeting on a regularly scheduled basis throughout the extended moratorium (they did not meet from March 15th through July 17th during the initial moratorium period)
• Specific actions taken by the Zoning Committee in developing and revising conditional use permit applications, as well as monitoring and inspection processes and procedures for developing mining, process and transfer operations
• Status report of current silica sand mining operations within Buffalo County
• Status report of joint work efforts between the Buffalo County departments (e.g. joint meetings between Health and Human Services and Zoning, Highway and UW-Extension, and Land Resources Departments) especially regarding unanswered questions about monitoring of air and water quality
• Communication and confirmation of any other expectations set by the County Board of Supervisors for these committees to achieve, especially the Zoning Committee (e.g. developing a Comprehensive Land Use Plan and a Comprehensive Non-metallic Mining Zoning Ordinance)

Citizens have been advised by several County Board Supervisors to continue to attend county meetings, to participate in public hearing processses and to talk directly with the County through public comment opportunities.  We urge you to facilitate this public participation and transparency by improving public notice, continuing to welcome public input and to create ways to invite the public into the process via citizen advisory groups.

Buffalo County Defenders

PO Box 472, Fountain City, WI 54629 — Website www.BCDefenders.com — Email info@bcdefenders.com

I hear a lot of sound bites from the miners when I go to hearings.  Most of the are easy to counter and, after a few tries, the miners seem to give up and move on to the next thing they think will divide the community and make it easier to ram their projects down our throats.

But I’ve been puzzling over a snappy comeback to a phrase that crept into the sound bite hit parade about a month ago.  It goes something like “I’m tired of hearing from Google-educated people about this.”  The implication is, of course, that learning via the Internet is somehow inferior to learning some other way.

Yesterday, we reelected Barack Obama for a second term as President.  Pick your side, I don’t care.  The main point I want to make is that some of us knew which way to bet on that election long before the results were in — because we’re Internet-educated.

If you listened to talk radio and let pundits form your views, or read textbooks and built your prediction on the rules of thumb that political scientists have built for you, your prediction about the election was probably wrong.  But I, an Internet-educated type guy, went to bed two hours before the networks called the election.  And as my head hit the pillow, I was pretty confident that I knew what was going to happen.  Sure enough, the result on Wednesday morning was spang on what I thought it would be.

So I still don’t have a cool one-liner to counteract the miners’ sound bite.  But I’m happy to call myself Internet educated and I hope you are too.  In the not too distant future, I bet we all will be Internet educated.  Maybe that will help us get to better solutions to these puzzlers we’re working on.

We’re off to testify in Wabasha tonight.  Here’s the handout of the day.

Click HERE for a PDF version of this file — feel free to send it to your friends.

I wanted to summarize the reasons why the Board of Adjustments denied the 7-Sands mine. So I listened to the recording of the meeting.

Here are the key points that they made when they denied the last application (they had to do it 6 times because of the way the applications were made, so they got pretty polished by the end):

• Proposed extension to the Moratorium
• The size of the facility
• Health department studies have raised issues of air quality and ground water quality impacts
• Impact of facility of the health and safety of the residents in the area
• Traffic issues
• Concerns that Glacier Sands and the CFC School District were unable to reach an agreement on the traffic safety issues
• Lack of harmony with the future development of the district
• Existing topography and drainage — impact on natural filtering capacity of the sand, by removing it — impact on ground water quality
• Substantial justice to all parties involved
• Concerns with the impact on the current economy — impact of running trucks through the small towns along the river (Fountain City and Alma)
• Impact on tourism economy
• Inability to agree on haul route and impact on students
• Public health, air quality and water quality
• Soil drainage
• Impact on, and safety of, County roads

As I was listening to the audio of the meeting, the Ray Charles version of “America the Beautiful” kept running through my head.  So I picked the last time through for the BOA and added Ray to the mix.

Ray’s on one channel, the BOA is on the other.  So if one is too loud, twiddle the “balance” control to set the mix to your liking.

Click HERE for the MP3.