ABSTRACT
Not only are rivers counted as the main sources of water supply, but also they are accounted for one of the sources of sediment production and transport. The needs of developing countries, like Iran, to infrastructure establishments, such as dams and highways, easy accessibility to high quality of sand and gravel materials have caused excessive river mining to be under-taken. This is where river mining phenomena, either deliberately or unwittingly, exceeds carrying capacity of the river (Guideline 2006).
If sand mining activities don’t perform regarding to technical instructions, it will cause negative impact on the natural balance of the river resulting in destruction of the surrounding land, the aquatic environment as birds and animal’s habitats, decrease the slope and degradation of the river bed which threats the piers of bridges, inverted siphon and intakes. Consequently, flood damages impacts may be intensified to culminate on river cross-structures damages (Soltani et al. in press).
In recent years, particularly due to the lack of technical standards and criteria as well as illegal sand and gravel mining without any control, a lot of damages happened to rivers. But in recent years sand and gravel mining is monitored and controlled by technical guidelines, description of services, and related legal regulations.
In this research, sand and gravel mining in Iran were initially investigated by comparing the extracted volume of sand and gravel in various years (Norouzi et al. 2013). In the following, the focus of the investigations has been on the analysis of the negative impacts of mining by concentrating on some important rivers where illegal mining was observed (Soltani et al. in press). In this concern, with predicted results of flow and sediment modeling of these rivers is discussed some issues as distance of mining pits from hydraulic structure, determination of allowable volume and depth of mining and refilling of previous mining pits. Bridge piers scouring due to illegal sand and gravel mining. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315623207/4fbc492d-6678-4a12-aaf6-5c2b8ea38e5f/content/fig189_1.jpg"/> Sand and gravel mining in Iran between 2002 and 2015. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315623207/4fbc492d-6678-4a12-aaf6-5c2b8ea38e5f/content/fig189_2.tif"/>
Thereafter, the following issues will be addressed: recent management actions in sand mining supervision, control volume of sand mining, prevent unauthorized withdrawals and dealing with offenders in the country.
Finally, some managerial and technical suggestions for proper river mining will be presented while reclamation needs and negative impacts are minimized.
