I was driving to work on I-80 westbound, clipping along at 65 mph, when one of those dreaded double-trailer dump trucks just ahead of me began spewing rocks the size of horse chestnuts out the back.
This is a fairly regular occurrence since they began reinventing I-15 but it's never boring as you try desperately to maneuver out of the way of the barrage without taking out a fellow motorist.
I recall thinking that the rocks hurtling toward me resembled the killer asteroid attack I'd seen the night before in a low-budget sci-fi movie on cable (so many channels and still nothing to watch).
But my attempts at taking evasive action proved fruitless, as they usually do. One of the baby boulders skipped off the asphalt, did a perfect double Salchow and smashed into my windshield.
I shook my fist and shouted unheard imprecations at the truck driver who continued on his way oblivious and uncaring of the comprehensive insurance claims he was leaving in his wake.
Feeling abused, I continued on my way to work, thinking dark thoughts about dump trucks and the industry that employs them. My thoughts turned to the ugly wounds the gravel pits are making to hillsides on Wasatch Drive, North Salt Lake and the Point of the Mountain, the latter looking less like a point these days and more like a stump eaten away by sharks during a feeding frenzy.
The sand and gravel industry is like a cancer, I fumed. A noisy, dusty cancer that consumes our hillsides and then spits them back out at us on the freeway.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I arrived at work to find a treatise by Alan E. Isaacson, research analyst for the University of Utah Bureau of Economic and Business Research, waiting for me in the morning mail. Its title: "Sand and Gravel in Utah — Production value and the relationship to construction costs."
OK, it's a lousy title, but research people aren't known for writing snappy headlines. Still, it had some interesting things to say about the industry we all love to hate.
For example, while the pits are a major eyesore and the dump trucks a menace to motorists, their products have become a major component of virtually everything. Not just roads depend on sand and gravel. New homes, schools, churches, offices . . . everything that gets built these days require vast quantities of the stuff.
According to Isaacson, building an average new home requires 100 cubic yards of concrete and concrete is composed of 75-80 percent gravel. A typical church building needs 560 cubic yards of concrete, not to mention 990 tons of asphalt and 2,400 tons of gravel.
The average asphalt road is composed of 90-95 percent gravel. Then there's all that sand and gravel needed for backfill, road base, plaster, snow and ice control, water filtration and roofing granules.
Get the picture? Unless we want to stop growing (and that would be fine with many of you , I'm sure) we need the gravel pits and the trucks. The rock-spouting rig that took out my windshield was actually on a mission of great importance and I was merely of casualty of growth and prosperity.
As the saying goes, you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs and that apparently applies to windshields as well.
I was surprised to learn that we harbor the mother lode of sand and gravel here in Utah. Isaacson says Utah ranked 10th among the 50 states in S&G production in 1997 and that same year, Monroc's plant at the Stump of the Mountain was the second largest producer in the United States. Not only that, unlike most areas of the country where quarrying and crushing bedrock makes for very expensive sand and gravel, our S&G is just lying around waiting to be scooped up. Cheap as dirt, you might say, and it presumably makes our construction costs a bit cheaper than elsewhere.
We have ancient Lake Bonneville to thank for much of this largess. It left three major sand and gravel deposits along its shoreline in what would become Salt Lake County just so we could build freeways and condos 10 thousand years later — an amazing display of foresight.
Compared to that, what's a few busted windshields?
E-mail max@desnews.com or fax 801-236-7605. Max Knudson's column runs each Monday.