FORUM: Quarry supporters mischaracterized

By BOB KOWELL - Member of Friends of Liberty Quarry. | Thursday, May 29, 2008 10:23 AM PDT ∞

I was one of four people who went to show the press that there were two sides of the quarry issue at the human "NO QUARRY" sign display at Park Birdsall Park on May 4.

Some of the anti-quarry group think that our purpose in being there was to disrupt the assembly and to try to bully participants into leaving the event through use of threats, obnoxious bravado and foul language. Some discredit any study done by the city or Granite Construction in favor of the quarry, but instead endorse a scientific peer-review medical report, released by UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine, that showed a health risk due to certain kinds of air pollution.

I need to correct a few things: We never threatened or bullied anyone; there were 1,000 of them and four of us.

I'm not into suicide.

We were calm and not obnoxious. Maybe just us being there was obnoxious to some of them.

We don't and didn't use foul language.

There were not 2,500 people making up the NO QUARRY sign as stated by the No Quarry group; there were less than a thousand.

The opposition kept saying we worked for the quarry. We don't work for the quarry.

The Geffen School of Medicine article has nothing to do with quarry particulates (http://tinyurl.com/3mr9j8). If you read it, it is about ambient ultrafine particulate matter, highly enriched in redox cycling organic chemicals. It is not about particulates that we see every day when the wind blows. The quarry area would be covered when they perform their dynamiting once a day for a few seconds. You get more sound out of target practice at Camp Pendleton and more pollutants from cars traveling up and down the highway than you'll get from the quarry.

The opposition stated that jobs were not a significant factor for having a quarry. There won't be just the direct jobs that the quarry will produce. There will be an indirect improvement on the whole construction industry as more jobs are produced due to less expensive aggregate from the quarry to make concrete and asphalt.

They have convinced many people that they will be affected by plumes of dust from the dynamiting or the movement of earth. Again, the quarry site is covered during its operation.

The only doctor that I called on their "doctors against the quarry" list told me, through his secretary, that the quarry would be OK if it were more than 5 miles away. Five miles? How about 4.9 miles? Where did he get that number?

I took the opponents' list of businesses against the quarry and called a person on the list that I know: Saddleback Station's John Stillman. I asked him if he was against the quarry. He said that he was for the quarry. We called others on the list and we got the same reaction, but most people don't want their name in the newspaper as being for the quarry. They are afraid of retaliation.

Bob Kowell is a member of Friends of Liberty Quarry.