With summer just around the corner, Hesperus residents brace themselves for the 1930s-style Dust Bowl they live in every summer as over 240 coal trucks per day roar by their homes around the clock. Dust never sleeps. Commercial companies, per county codes, are supposed to control their dust, but the mine never has over the last decade under ownership of Grupos Cementos de Chihuahua – a Mexican cement company trying to figure out how to run its first coal mine.
GCC’s dust control plan is to spread 1½ cups of water per 20 square feet on the hot dusty road twice a week. Predictably, that takes care of the problem for an hour, and then the army of 43-ton semis continues its despoilment of the neighborhood under a thick shroud of choking dust settling on yards, inside homes and in residents’ lungs.
That dust is heavily laced with coal particles falling off the trucks and magnesium sulfate from road maintenance. GCC offers black-lung screening to its employees; perhaps it should extend the offer to residents, too. This particular code shouldn’t be allowed to sit on the shelf gathering dust this summer. Road maintenance – including dust control – is expensive, and GCC has hijacked county and state roads with its nonstop hauling of 1.3 million tons of coal, paying almost nothing to keep them drivable.
The road now belongs to GCC, but it pays only $7,200 per mil levy for hundreds of thousands of dollars of maintenance costs subsidized by us — the other taxpayers. It won’t cut the traffic, cut the dust or pay its share. You and I have to abide by the codes and rules, or we suffer the consequences.
Grupos Cementos de Chihuahua, which owns the coal mine, is inexplicably exempt, and it can’t be counted on to self-police or do what’s best for the neighborhood.
Go figure.
Jean Graham
Hesperus
