The letter to the editor about the Whipple Creek dirt dump in the March 10 edition of the Reflector mentions that the dirt dump operates as a quarry in reverse. Trucks arrive, there is noise, dust and runoff from the site and the trucks leave and the roads take a severe beating. In a quarry, the trucks arrive empty and leave full. In a dirt dump, trucks arrive full and leave empty.
Due to the traffic, noise and dust, quarries are required to be in an area designated by a surface mining overlay, located in remote areas and operated with a conditional use permit, none of which this proposed Whipple Creek dirt dump has.
Quarries have been a major nuisance and enforcement headache. Only 70 trucks a day are allowed at the notorious Livingston Mountain quarry, and the article says 34,000 one way trips would occur in an area zoned rural residential! That would be 130 one way trips a day five days a week for a year!
Most people would have 260 trucks a day passing their house. Operating 10 hours a day equals 26 trucks per hour or about one truck every two minutes. There are six school buses running in the neighborhood. Imagine them meeting dozens of semi trucks on the narrow rural roads and having them pile up behind the frequently stopping buses each day? This is an improper use of R-10 zoned land and the county should protect this neighborhood and all neighborhoods from this industrial scale commercial operation.
The developer may not realize that a septic drain field is not allowed by state law to be located in a fill, so no R-10 housing could be built on any acreage that was filled. Will the county allow the fill and then when the developer applies to use the land for rural residential as zoned tell them they can't develop the property as zoned?
