LA builders use gravel and sand from Canada for big projects

LOS ANGELES - The 519 miles of the Los Angeles freeway system. Dodger Stadium. City Hall. All built with concrete filled with rock and sand washed down from Southern California's mountain ranges.

For evidence of that mineral abundance, look no further than Irwindale, home to more than a dozen pits emptied in the 20th century for those critical building components.

But now, as another building boom rumbles across Los Angeles and a new generation of high-rises climbs skyward, the rock and sand are coming from a much more distant source: Canada's Vancouver Island, more than 1,400 miles away.

That's a long distance to ship commodities that are still abundant locally, sell for less than $20 a ton and often cost more to transport than to mine.

Yet because of a combination of materials science, cheap ocean shipping and, some argue, not-in-my-backyard attitudes. today's industrial concrete mixers are often filled with imported rock and sand.

Consider a new apartment building going