How one Utah community fought the fracking industry—and won.
sign at the north end of Kanab proclaims the town of 4,700 to be “The Greatest Earth on Show.” It’s a rare case of truth in advertising. Kanab sits just seven miles north of the Arizona state line, at the crossroads of some of the Southwest’s most beautiful places. In every direction a geologic wonderland awaits. To the north is Zion National Park with its breathtaking valley of 2,000-foot-tall rustand-white sandstone cliffs. The sweeping expanse of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument stretches to the east, and just to the south, you’ll find the Grand Canyon’s North Rim.
JANUARY 30, 2020 | 9
Staircase-Escalante, both of which President Trump slashed in order to increase drilling and mining opportunities. Despite public pushback and some legal challenges, though, the frac sand mine seemed to be cruising toward approval as recently as October. It still needed an environmental impact assessment from the Bureau of Land Management, and the two water transfers require approval from the state engineer. The project definitely wasn’t a done deal, but in industry-friendly Utah, it had a good shot. So it might have come as a surprise to a number of residents when Southern Red Sands announced at the beginning of January that it was abandoning the proposed project. What happened? And are there any lessons that other communities fighting extraction threats can learn? “Speak out, pull together like-minded neighbors, organize and don’t give up,” Hand said after hearing the news. “But also, try to be nice.” Surprisingly, it’s that last bit that might have made a big difference—along with a good hard look at the endeavor’s economics.
| CITY WEEKLY |
panies conducting hydraulic fracturing. The sand is a lesser-known but substantial aspect of the fracking process. Round grains of silica sand serve as a “proppant” to keep underground fissures in the shale open as oil and gas are pumped out. Fracking a single well can require thousands of tons of sand. “I really wanted to keep an open mind, but the more I learned about the project, the more concerned I got,” Hand told me in September. She had reason to be worried. The first decade of the fracking boom relied heavily on so-called “frac sand” sourced mostly from Midwest states like Minnesota and Wisconsin, where mining reduced verdant green hills to piles of dust. But Midwest mining has its limits. Sand
is expensive to ship across the country, so as fracking has taken off in Utah, Texas and New Mexico, companies have looked to find more local sources to trim costs. That’s when the proposed mine in Kanab entered the story. Southern Red Sands, a two-person startup backed by Utah real-estate developer Kem Gardner, hoped to establish the region’s next frac sand mine in a scenic area of state-owned lands outside Kanab called Red Knoll. City and county officials quickly gave their blessing—and a combined 1,200 acre-feet of water rights a year—after only cursory consideration. But residents became concerned about impacts to scenic beauty, water resources and local businesses. They teamed up to fight back, forming a community group called Keep Kanab Unspoiled. It was beginning to feel like a familiar story. The struggle between extractive industries and environmental protection is not new to Utah. A fight is still raging nearby over the boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument and Grand
You don’t even need to leave Kanab, which is ringed by the famously red-hued Vermillion Cliffs, to get socked by jawdropping beauty. It’s this landscape that drew Susan Hand to Kanab 25 years ago when she opened Willow Canyon Outdoor to sell gear, maps, books and coffee to local and visiting adventurers. And it’s this landscape and the community’s gateway-tothe-wonderland experience, the economic bedrock of this tourism-dependent town, that she worried would be destroyed by a new industrial project proposed last year 10 miles north of town. There, a company called Southern Red Sands LLC had announced plans to build a facility to mine and process massive amounts of sand for use by oil and gas com-
@ TARALOHAN
| MUSIC | CINEMA | DINING | A&E | NEWS |
STORY AND PHOTOS BY TARA LOHAN | COMMENTS@ CITYWEEKLY.NET |
| CITYWEEKLY.NET |
A Crusade in Kanab
