Fletcher’s/Winstone Aggregates History of Denial

The thing about Environment Court hearings is there’s lots of time to chat. You gather before a hearing day, morning tea, lunchtime. And you get the gossip. It has been an opportunity for me hear Dick Bellamy’s side of the Three Kings Quarry story – which goes back a long way. Over thirty years.

The first story he told me about was dust. When the quarry was fairly shallow, he says he could regularly see from his house a D9 bulldozer sitting on top of a pile of scoria. Not sure what it was doing there. And then scoria would be tipped into a stone crusher and plumes of scoria dust would blow into the air, and with a reasonable wind, it would blow over houses in the neighbourhood. So that was a big issue for the locals. Dr Bellamy tried to do something about it. Winstone’s denied that the dust coating the good painted weatherboard homes of Mt Eden was from its operation.

So Dr bellamy carefull took samples of the dust from the houses, and – presumably late at night – scampered down to the quarry and scraped some scoria dust off the stone crusher – and took the samples into his mates at Auckland University. They tested both samples and confirmed they were from the same source.

And when confronted with this evidence, Winstone’s claimed that because the roads on the vicinity had been re-surfaced (good old chip seal I guess) with scoria from its quarry (it claimed), then the motorists using the roads had caused the dust.

Man oh man.

Then, Dr Bellamy explained, came the de-watering. Residents had hoped that when the quarry got down to the water table, quarrying would stop. But Winstone’s applied to de-water the quarry so it could dig deeper. It wanted to dig down much further and get out more scoria. By now residents had succeeded in preventing Winstones from mining basalt – very hard and tough – needed explosives, caused vibration and ground shaking. Dr Bellamy was among the residents who took Winstone’s to task over this. They were concerned about the effects of subsidence. When land is de-watered, certain geologies will shrink, causing subsidence. He explained to me this was because there are old river valleys underneath Auckland’s recent volcanic rocks. These are sedimentary and prone to shrink when de-watered. However it appears that Winstone’s again denied such things would happen. Would never happen.

But there has been subsidence Dr Bellamy confirmed. Not a lot, but it has occurred, in contradiction to Winstone’s firm view. Presumably supported by it experts.

So now we have another denial. This denial is that the contaminants from permitted contaminated fill, will not get into the groundwaters, and will not get into Auckland’s aquifers.

Man oh man.