Havre de Grace, Maryland
Guided Tour
Currently, the quarry is about 250 feet from the surface; each bench being 60 feet deep on the upper levels and 40 feet deep on the lower levels. There are 183 acres of Arundel Corporation property.
Like LaFarge, safety precautions are taken, both within the quarry and throughout the surrounding area. Special consideration is given to neighbors of the quarry; berms are built around the site to decrease the noise, and regulations are in effect to limit blasting times to three times a week, between the hours of 12:00pm and 2pm.
After holes are drilled into the rock, fertilizer, and diesel fuel, blasting caps are re-used to blast the rock from the Earth. Seismographs and the Richter Scale are reviewed, since both are used to determine the strength of the explosions in the quarry.
The entire operation is rigorously inspected by the county and state for environmental compliance. Sediment ponds can be seen and students should note that all water used for washing the stones and trucks is recycled back into the old quarries and used over and over.
The operation is run mainly by computer, every little manpower, approximatley 35 employees, is need to run the entire quarry. In the picture below, you can see the trucks that haul the blasted rock.
The crusher that breaks the rock into
smaller pieces, the sifters that, like soil sieves, separate rocks into
a variety of sizes, and the conveyor belts that carry the rock throughout
the quarry.
All machines except for the trucks and loaders, are run by electricity,a nd the average monthly electric bill of $40,000 is compared with household electric bills.
In the top picture, larger stones are seen that are being transported to go through the “crusher run,” a machine that will create a combination of several sizes of stone and “fines,” often used for gravel roads and driveways. Prices of gravel for roads is $5.00 per ton being an average cost.
One advantage Arundel Quarry has is its location. Being located along the water, Arundel can load the quarried rock onto barges, which have the capacity to transport, 6000 tons of rock, which is 100 Mac trucks worth, up and down the Susquehanna River. Barges on the river can also be seen. Much of this rock is shipped to the Eastern Shore, since the harder rock is so hard to get to on the coastal plain.
