How Kanab UT Turned Back A Corrupt And Environmentally Destructive Fracking Sands Mine

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Southern Red Sands hoped to start digging on 640 acres of land around Red Knoll, an aptly name rise of coral-colored rock and sand. The area is managed as part of Utah’s School and International Trust Lands Administration (SITLA), where state-owned property can be leased (often for resource extraction), with revenue being funneled to education.

The operation would have started by bulldozing all the trees, shrubs, grasses and forbs, then scraped up to 30 feet of the earth from the exposed surface. The sand would then be processed — washed with water and chemicals, then dried and sorted — in a facility with up to six 120-foot-tall silos. After that it would be loaded into trucks and hauled out.

A small fraction of the remaining sediment — mostly the fine silts and clays — would be put back on the land. But that change in geology could mean a big change for the aquifer. How big would depend on the scope of the project, though.

In addition to the SITLA land, Southern Red Sands had acquired placer claims — mineral exploration rights — for 12,000 surrounding acres managed by the BLM. And although the company said it planned to mine only 700,000 tons a year from the SITLA property, the facility would have had the capacity and water rights to accommodate much more. “If they’re building a plant with a capacity of 3 million tons a year, that’s presumably because they expect to be able to produce that,” Dean Baker, a Kanab resident and opponent of the project told me in December. “They may never do that, but you don’t build extra capacity without the idea that you might use it.”

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https://therevelator.org/frac-sand-kanab/?fbclid=IwAR3qWA7xdMSurNom0tw4l5X4n-heJe8hbXomAFb7AhMYViXRewBBuXKP2Qs