PARKS — An email from Steve Dudley of Williams reports Drake Cement, a foreign owned company, has now claimed an additional 1416 acres of Kaibab National Forest land for yet another Pozzolan open pit site.
These most recent claims are called the Spring Valley claims and are located in Parks immediately behind Spring Valley Cabin, west of Spring Valley Road. Any development of this site into an open pit mine will result in loss of some very beautiful habitat and result in an immense increase of mining truck traffic down Spring Valley Road, through Parks.
Mr. Dudley wrote in the email, “If you have any concerns about this potential future development and you live in and around Parks, now is the time to say something. Once the trucks start rolling, it will be far too late.”
The Williams Grand Canyon Newspaper is developing an article on this recent development and would like to hear from and interview interested parties from Parks regarding their feelings about this.
According to Wikipedia, “The general definition of a pozzolan embraces a large number of materials which vary widely in terms of origin, composition and properties. Both natural and artificial (man-made) materials show pozzolanic activity and are used as supplementary cementitious materials. Artificial pozzolans can be produced deliberately, for instance by thermal activation of kaolin-clays to obtain metakaolin, or can be obtained as waste or by-products from high-temperature process such as fly ashes from coal-fired electricity production. The most commonly used pozzolans today are industrial by-products such as fly ash, silica fume from silicon smelting, highly reactive metakaolin, and burned organic matter residues rich in silica such as rice husk ash. Their use has been firmly established and regulated in many countries.”
He wrote, “Please feel free to share and alert the citizens of Parks to this. We need to hear from you! If you live in the Parks area and would like your voice heard please contact the Williams Newspaper at (928) 635-4426; (928) 699-8874 or write whowell@williamsnews.com.”
We have downloaded the Contact List and will be sending letters to same.
Let us know if there is anything else we can do. We have owned our home in Parks since 2006 and would hate to see it spoiled. Spring Valley Road has enough traffic already. Mining trucks rolling daily would be unbearable. We live at the corner of Spring Valley and Fallow Deer Roads.