Surface mining, with its accompanying dust, noise, truck traffic, and land disruption, generally conflicts with most urban land uses. Urban development, however, is dependent upon the availability of nearby mineral resources for the construction of roads and buildings. As a result of this conflict, many urban areas are now faced with rapidly rising construction costs, partly because of a failure to recognize and use aggregate resources before building over such resources or making them unavailable by zoning.

Over 7,000 miles of lineations have been observed on aerial photographic mosaics of the Texas Coastal Zone. These lineations, in part, represent the surface traces of faults originating in the Tertiary sediments and propagating through the Quaternary sediments. The extrapolation of subsurface faults from specific oil and gas reservoirs are commonly coincident to lineations in those areas. Some extrapolated fault traces weave back and forth across lineations for 10 to 20 miles and then coincide with another lineation and follow it for 20 miles.