Web Posted: 06/05/2005 12:00 AM CDT
Adolfo Pesquera
Express-News business writer
Since the days when Franciscan priests surveyed sites for the first mission walls, limestone has defined the color and texture of San Antonio.
Limestone walls protected the early settlers, and the limestone aquifer-fed springs made irrigation farming possible. Work on San Antonio de Valero, later known as the Alamo, began in 1744 with stone taken from what is now Brackenridge Park.
Limestone has been quarried here ever since.
But the quarries increasingly must coexist, sometimes tenuously, with neighborhoods. As developers encroach on their borders, the blasting shakes houses and brings in dust. Trucking and rail add noise and traffic.
The City Council brought some order to a quarrelsome situation when it enacted restrictions seven years ago on quarry operations.
Former Councilwoman Bonnie Connor recalls the city’s action and quarry companies’ willingness to work with residents helped change attitudes.
“They (Martin Marietta) have a seismograph in the Vineyard area,” near Blanco Road and Loop 1604, Connor said.
A company ombudsman meets regularly with residents to listen to and respond to complaints, she said.
The three major aggregate producers in Bexar County are Martin Marietta, Vulcan Materials and Alamo Cement. All are on land that is being surrounded by residential and commercial development and all have gone to more expensive blasting techniques to mitigate noise and dust.
Of the three, the area around Vulcan Materials’ Huebner Road quarry is the most developed.
“Vulcan is surrounded by residential,” Connor said, noting its proximity to The Woods of Shavano and Hunter Creek subdivisions. The city long has been interested in taking over the site, but Vulcan has not been forthcoming about how much longer it will mine the site, she said.
“We were looking at that site for water storage,” Connor said. “There was a plan to put in high-end housing around the edge (of a reservoir).”
Clay Upchurch, director of human resources at Vulcan’s San Antonio office, said the Huebner Road site has 20 to 30 quarry life years left, depending on the rate of extraction.
It’s fate after that, he said, is promising.
“The land will definitely have value,” Upchurch said. “It will not be a place that is just a dead spot.”
The metamorphosis of quarries into other uses has become part of how aggregate miners market themselves as good citizens, and it’s profitable.
“San Antonio is an amazingly good story for my industry,” Upchurch said. “In many areas we don’t own the land, (but) where we own the land we’ve gotten involved in reclaiming — putting in a lake or retail, selling it back to the city for a water supply.”
Quarries must operate near cities; shipping is a major factor in price. But the restrictions resulting from urban sprawl also come with a price.
Martin Marietta’s Beckmann Quarry now restricts blasting to afternoon hours because of complaints from residents about vibration.
“It is becoming more and more difficult to find mineral reserves that are strategically located near the growth markets in our industry,” said Bruce Vaio, chief executive officer for Martin Marietta Materials’ six area quarrying operations.
The Texas Conference of Urban Counties for years has attempted to gain greater authority for county commissioners courts from the state to limit encroachment by developers on quarries and other noncompatible industries.
Sen. Jeff Wentworth, R-San Antonio, introduced legislation to that effect, Senate Bill 142, in the past session.
“SB 142 is not passing,” said Donald Lee, executive director of the association.
While a compromise version got out of committee, it got stuck in the Senate. It was a victim, Lee said, of resistance from the Texas Association of Builders.
“Incompatible land uses is a problem we are going to have to address if we are going to have as prosperous a future as we have had in the past,” he said. “This bill gave counties the ability to fashion the solutions that were necessary.”
Like Martin Marietta, Vulcan meets regularly with neighborhood associations. Upchurch said neighbor relations have, of necessity, become “a core component of what we do; we do it everywhere.”
Vulcan has a second major quarry operation in Bexar County near Helotes. But it, too, is being surrounded by residential development. Looking to its future needs, the company recently purchased 1,800 acres in rural Medina County.
Even in this rural area, residents are fighting to stop Vulcan. The company hopes to start mining operations by mid-2006.
“People,” Connor noted, “just don’t like to see change in their community. But you have all this road-building going on. You have to have those products.”
One might think residents would be less hostile to quarries in the Central Texas counties north of Austin, where mining operations are much smaller. Those quarries blast less and saw more to produce architectural materials. But operators there say they frequently get complaints.
Most mining is for crushed stone used in cement and road paving. Texas is the nation’s largest producer of crushed stone products, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. But the state’s population is so large that it consumes the majority of the product internally.
Bexar County is a net exporter, Martin Marietta’s Vaio said. Much of its product goes to Houston or South Texas by rail.
Most crushed rock operators, known as aggregate producers, are huge multinational firms. Four of the eight largest firms operate along the Balcones Escarpment.
“Vulcan is the largest producer of aggregates in the United States,” Vaio said. “Martin Marietta is the second-largest producer. On a local basis, we are larger. But Vulcan is a very formidable competitor.”
In Comal County, Hanson Building Materials America, the nation’s third-largest aggregate producer, has operated a quarry near Garden Ridge since 1977.
Comal also is home now to CeMex SA, a Monterrey, Mexico-based company that on March 1 announced its acquisition of England-based RMC Group. The buyout gave CeMex assets near New Braunfels.
“CeMex, with RMC, will be the largest ready-mix company in the world,” CeMex Chief Executive Officer Lorenzo H. Zambrano declared.
CeMex has been buying quarry and cement operations around the world for decades. Its latest acquisition made it the third-largest in cement and fourth-largest in aggregates in the world.
Vaio is no stranger to takeovers. Martin Marietta kept him on as head of its Bexar County operations when it acquired Beckman Quarry by Loop 1604 and Interstate 10 from Lafarge North America Inc. in the mid-1990s.
Beckman Quarry, operating since the 1940s, can last for just over 40 more years, Vaio said.
But so much limestone has been excavated that its transformation to other uses is well under way. Fiesta Texas was built in an abandoned section of the quarry. The Rim, a megaretail development, is under construction in a vacated section of Beckmann immediately east of I-10.
Charles Hodges, the Dallas architect who designed the master plan for The Rim, was chosen for the project because of his experience in designing Alamo Quarry Market, the tony midtown center that, along with Alamo Quarry Golf Course, arose out of the old Alamo Cement Co. and quarry site.
“Quarries are absent of natural features that would somewhat limit site planning,” Hodges said. “Many times, those sites will allow an opportunity to be really creative.”
The city’s oldest quarries long ago became vital components of the city through reinvention.
San Antonio Zoo and the Japanese Tea Gardens in Brackenridge Park once were quarries. Across U.S. 281, Trinity University rose from a quarry.
Meanwhile, the defunct Longhorn Quarry by the northeast I-35 corridor sits biding its time. Developers unsuccessfully put it forth as a candidate site for the SBC Center.
“I think it has great potential,” Hodges said. “You can be assured that these quarry sites will have a wonderful life after the rock crusher has gone.”