The biggest threat to Fresno’s greatest natural resource is ready to strike. If community members don’t rally to the occasion and stop this predator in its tracks, a multinational mining corporation will gain permission to pillage and plunder the San Joaquin River for another 100 years. With license to employ methods that cause more environmental damage than those used for the last century. Fresno County residents have rallied for such causes in the not-too-distant past. In 2012, an outpouring of citizen criticism prevented CEMEX from blasting away Jesse Morrow Mountain near Yokuts Valley. Now it’s up to us to keep the same company from dynamiting the San Joaquin River bottom 3 miles outside the Fresno city limits. Yes, dynamiting. To continue operations in areas depleted by alluvial mining (i.e. extracting gravel, crushed stone, sand and clay from stream bed deposits), CEMEX is seeking county approval to blast and drill a 600-foot deep pit into the river’s bedrock.
—Written by Marek Warszawski, columnist for The Fresno Bee