Work to set up a stockpiling site at Hornsby Quarry, located west of the Hornsby town centre in New South Wales, is scheduled to start early next month.
This includes establishing baffle mounds measuring around five metres high at key sections surrounding the stockpiling area to reduce noise.
A popular mountain bike trail in Olds Mans Valley will close in July for three months and will be upgraded with a new section to go over a conveyor belt carrying crushed rock into the quarry.
Plant and equipment will be delivered in October and the spoil from the NorthConnex motorway project is expected to be transported to the site from January 2017 for up to 28 months.
The Daily Telegraph newspaper has reported that the project will cost Hornsby Council $7.33 million.
The council will lease the land to the New South Wales Roads and Maritime Services (RMS) for the project. The land should be handed back to the council in late 2018.
As previously reported by Quarry, the spoil management project involves the transportation of up to 1.5 million m3 of virgin and excavated natural material from Sydney’s 9km NorthConnex motorway tunnelling project to the inactive quarry site to raise its floor to a level safe for rehabilitation.
Truck movements
The number of truck movements to or from the Hornsby Quarry, according to RMS, will be limited to 70 per hour (or 35 vehicles) for the period of filling. In total, the maximum number of spoil haulage trucks accessing the quarry site per day would be 385 (or 770 vehicle movements). This is expected to be low compared to existing traffic volumes on Sydney’s road network.
RMS has also stated that the partial filling of the quarry will also reduce the overall distance required for transporting the North Connex project spoil by 3.7 million km (based on 1 million m3 of spoil provided to the quarry). A third of the spoil from NorthConnex will be transported to Hornsby Quarry.
Hornsby Quarry was established in the early 1900s. It was operated by CSR Construction Materials from 1959 but ceased operations in the late 1990s and was later acquired by Hornsby Shire Council in 2002.
In October 2014, the council unanimously agreed to redevelop the site into a recreational space with possible applications including zip-lining, rope climbing and abseiling.
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