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i. Setbacks
The first of these is setbacks. Setbacks are strips of
unmined land between pit walls and property lines, and they can
vary in size. Legal restrictions in Texas require a 25-foot
setback for pit walls adjoining a public road,7 but the setbacks
for pit walls not adjacent to a public road are up to the
operator and property owner. The evidence showed setbacks in the
Houston area range from 5 to 50 feet. Some of this variance
depends on what type of soil is present on the property--the more
compact the soil in a pit wall, the less likely it is to collapse
and the narrower the setback can be. And some of the variance
simply lies in an operator’s risk preference. (The risk being
that the walls collapse and damage adjoining land.)
We begin by finding that Hamblen Road, a public road, runs
along the southern edge of the property for 1,022 feet. On the
other sides, there is a private road on the east (1,600 feet), a
railroad easement on the west (1,550 feet), and the remaining 24-
acre parcel on the north that Terrene decided to keep (695
feet).8 Other than along Hamblen Road, then, the precise size of
the setback is entirely discretionary. We do think that prudence
7 See Tex. Nat. Res. Code Ann. sec. 133.044 (2005).
8 The parties introduced good maps of the property, which
show it to be quadrilateral--but it’s not a rectangle, and
there’s nothing in the record describing the angles involved,
making areal calculations of parts of the property necessarily
imprecise. We also round to the nearest whole number here and
throughout our calculations.
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Last modified: November 10, 2007