Residents Make Noise About Lake Chabot Quarry Plan
photo by Mike McGuire
Overflow crowd hears about EBMUD's proposed Quarry Project at a February 1 city council committee meeting in San Leandro.
Some 150 people packed San Leandro’s Surlene Grant Meeting Room on East 14th Street near City Hall to hear about a proposal by the East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) to refill a long-closed quarry off Lake Chabot Road and build a new park with hiking trails there.
Area residents and others at the meeting complained that the park’s opening would only come after decades of steady and noisy dump truck traffic carrying used trench soil from water pipe replacement projects throughout EBMUD’s service area to the quarry site.
EBMUD engineers say replacing the old soil with new is essential for the stability and longevity of the new pipes being installed to replace old ones and is a standard pipeline construction practice. The utility says this leaves much old soil to reuse or dispose of.
EBMUD estimates some 30 to 100 dump trucks would come to the site each weekday for 40 to 80 years, depending on whether the quarry gets all the trench soil or other sites get some of it.
“It would be converting a peaceful residential neighborhood into a 40 to 80-year construction zone,” said Bay-O-Vista resident Tim Ballas. “A peaceful setting is our reason for choosing to live here.”
Members of the San Leandro City Council’s Facilities & Transportation Committee heard the EBMUD proposal and advised against any quick approval. Councilmembers Fred Simon and Bryan Azevedo and Mayor Juan Gonzalez, who participated remotely, called for the full council to look at the proposal and get several questions answered by EBMUD.
Councilmember Celina Reynes, whose district includes Bay-O-Vista and who attended despite not being on the committee, congratulated her constituents for organizing around the project. Reynes also wanted the full council to consider the proposal.
Project Manager Chien Wang assured the meeting that none of EBMUD’s used soil going to the quarry would come from industrial areas and would be held to cleanliness standards.
She also said that noise would be minimized as much as possible, limited to daytime during the workweek, with most operations occurring mid-day.
The old quarry site sits immediately adjacent to San Leandro’s Bay-O-Vista neighborhood. The nearest house is some 100 feet away, according to both EBMUD and Save Lake Chabot Road, a group opposing the project whose members came to the meeting in force.
The group has gathered over 1,000 names on a petition opposing the project as it is now proposed. They cite concerns about the stability of the road, the inappropriateness of the location as a centralized facility, and the safety of pedestrians, bicyclists, and cars if a large number of dump trucks use the narrow, sometimes twisting road.
According to city and county figures, some 990 homes in Bay-O-Vista, and some 3,500 cars a day use Lake Chabot Road normally. However, it is currently closed for most of its length due to recent rain and mudslide damage.
The site was last used for mining in 1996, but several small non-mining businesses operate there now.
The old quarry site at 13575 Lake Chabot Road is on unincorporated county land, but the city line is nearby, and trucks would be using the city portion of the road to bring loads to the site. The empty trucks would then return on the county portion of the road ending at Fairmont Drive, ending on I-580.