About the Mt Coot-tha Local Residents (MCLR)

The MCLR and Website Scope:

The Mt Coot-tha Residents Quarry Action Group was formed c2000 in response to the very bad noise, dust and blast vibrations that the Brisbane City Council Mt Coot-tha Quarry (MCQ) was causing to their precious homes and health.
The MCQAG was founded with David Brown as the chairperson, and John Higgins took over the Chairman role c2003.
In 2010 John Higgins appointed local resident Mr Philip Best to become the group's Secretary and Engineer.
In March 2018 after the passing of John Higgins, the local residents asked Mr Best to take on the job of Chairman as well. Mr Best accepted for a minimum period of 12 months.
The local residents were unhappy with the Action Group name, plus there were other issues such as the Legacy Way Tunnel and Zipline. Hence the group name was changed to Mt Coot-tha Local Residents and the website dropped the MCQAG domain name.
The MCLR group currently exists in the (approximately) 80 homes bound by Mt Coot-tha Rd, Sir Samuel Griffith Drv, Birdwood Tce and Richer St.
Their mailing list includes approximately 80 local residents and this is expected to increase greatly when this website is completed and publicised.

The purpose of this website is therefore intended to be the one place where anyone can quickly gain an understanding of what the local residents are suffering now, and how the Brisbane City Council owned and operated Mt Coot-tha Quarry damages the local residents homes and health by misrepresenting the MCQ blast vibration footprint to the EHP/DES, thereby greatly increasing the local residents their home maintenance & repair costs year on year.

The MCLR Progress:

The MCLR has performed two primary operations regarding the Mt Coot-tha Quarry (MCQ):
1. In 2017, the MCLR proved beyond all reasonable doubt that the damaging blast vibration footprint as reported to the EHP/DES department by the BCC Works Department MCQ was grossly misrepresented for 600 blasts by approximatey 3 times or 300%.
 -   The BCC and MCQ only reported the effects that were measured at much further away distances and kept the local readings to themselves.
 -   Hence a blast that was reported by the BCC to EHP/DES as 10mm/second (recorded at Sussex St) was on average 30mm/second at the homes on Mt Coot-tha Road.
 -   This illegal practice only ceased (in 2012) when the Local Residents were forced to intervene to stop their homes from being damaged.
2. In 2018, the MCLR measured blast vibrations actually inside a home on Mt Coot-tha Rd, (adjacent to the new BCC monitoring point), proving that the internal vibration was 2.5 times or 250% of those currently being reported by the BCC MCQ works to the EHP/DES department.
 -   Hence the 10mm/second Sussex St measured and reported blast would have averaged a massive 40mm/second actually inside the local residents Mt Coot-tha Rd homes, which is 8 times or 800% the normal QLD EHP/DES, NSW, Victorian, ANZEC and Australian maximum.
 -   This is also 20 times (or 2,000%) of the QLD TMR Historic (Old MtCoot-tha Rd) and Stuartholme buildings" and (Toowong Cemetary) Monuments maximum.
Reports: The MCLR have provided several reports to the EHP/DES and the BCC, which includes clear evidence of blast vibration excess and damage. This was totally ignored.
FYI: Blast Vibration Energy is measured in mm/second particle velocity, of which the "particles" might either be in the ground or in a building.

Current Status - The Big Five:

1. Brisbane's Big Hole:
The quarry is a massive open-cut mine only 4klm from the City and adjacent to the much loved Botanic Gardens plus the Mt Coot-tha urban residential area (for which Brisbane City approved the change of use from Rural to Residential, plus the homes built there).
As we create this web page, "The Big Hole" is continually growing in size and the huge scale of this can only be appreciated when you visit the site (hence it is restricted).
The Local Residents have taken and analysed photographic images which shows that there is less than one year's quantity of quality asphalt gravel available for extraction.
Hence the big question is when will the quarry stop its damaging blast vibrations and actually cease their moning operations.
Once this happens then the exclusion that Janel Spillman refers to in her publication Brisbane's Breathing Space" will expire and the entire massive hole should revert to the trustee control. However there are some photos and the recent Zipline brochure clearly shows the aerial photo, plus calls to wait until the quarry closes.
When they finally close the quarry, will the ratepayers pay to have a Big Hole in their budgets to get the hole filled in, or will the Quarry Management simply leave it to become a dumping ground.
Brisbane Council has no publicly available rehabilitation plans, which is not surprising as the proposed closure of date 2032 is some 13 years from now.

2. Repeated Closure Date Extensions:
The Mt Coot-tha Quarry Closure date has been changed 3 times. It was supposed to close in 1998, and then extended till 2015.
The Council quietly Extended the Closure date to 2032 but without any public announcement or residential consultation, so almost nobody knew about the date extension.
Local residents purchased property here expecting the quarry to close, whilst others purchased property at post-closure prices.
Other local residents have damage to their homes, which cannot be repaired nbecause the (blasting) cause is ongoing.

3. Derm/EHP/DES Department Frustration:
The DERM/EHP/DES department did nothing about the permanent blast monitoring being only at the much further away locations Sussex St (SST) and Richer St (RST).
They don't enforce the extremely loud noise generated inside the homes and they don't enforce the extreme vibration levels created inside the homes, as they get shaken by the blast which is located just accross the road.
There are known historic buildings very close to the quarry, but they take no notice of these and the 2mm/second historic buiding limit imposed by TMR and others.

4. Tourism Perspective:
The Brisbane City Council owned and operated Mt Coot-tha Quarry is in the heart of an Australian easily accessable World Class Nature Tourism precinct, yet it is a fully functioning quarry mine.
LM Quirk is happy to travel overseas to promote the tourism and he is right there, because with the Brisbane Airport Expansion, the Mega Cruise Ship Terminal and Australia"s longest ZipLine, Mt Coot-tha tourism is set to rapidly increase.
We predict a million tourists to Mt Coot-tha every three or four months and by the time that the scheduled Quarry Closure date arrives, the tourism could reach 1 million every month, with significant employment and economic advantage.
But these tourists don't travel a long way to see an ugly, dirty, dusty, noisy, quarry mine - which does very strong blasts once per week and forces the Botanic Gardens and other facilities to evict it's precious tourists (who probably arrived on a bus and are thus stranded).

5. BCC Aggregates Department Ignores the Residents
So today we have the situation where the BCC Aggregates deptartment Mr Bird will not answer our emails and will not talk to us, hence the residents live in fear of their own home being damaged by extra strong quarry blasts, which are illegal not legally defined on every 10th blast.
For everybody here the Quarry closure date being set to 2032, is incredibly intolerable. ""We just need to get on with our lives without fear, like ordinary Brisbane people do. (JH 2009)"
We don"t want to be trouble-makers, we don"t want to interveve, plus we should not be forced to create an advocate group to spend thousands of hours and dollars, fighting for our protection and rights.
For those older local residents who will hopefully live long enough to see the quarry actually close, they wonder if this date will again be changed (for the 4th time).

The Big Five - More Details

The Repeated Closure Date Extensions:
Our understanding is that a Closure Date is a date when something will actually close.
- To Extend the Closure date by a small amount is generally acceptable.
- However when the remaining lifespan is more than doubled, that indicates a total lack of honesty and respect.
- Many of the current residents are old and have clearly shown measurable suffering.

When you read through the large amount of material collected by David Brown, John Higgins and the affected Mt Coot-tha Residents, it is clear that the Mt Coot-tha Quarry with its Dust, Operational Noise, Blast Vibration and Greatly Reduced Equity has dominated the Local Residents lives for the past 20 years.
To have the situation where a closure date was set by trusted people, and with a whole neighbourhood hanging it hopes on that date, only to have that date changed 3 times, is absolute despair.
Most ordinary people believe that when their Lord Mayor and Civic Council says that their adjacent quary (with zero separation zone) will close, that this date becomes fixed.
However to have a situation where the closure date is changed again so that the active period was more than doubled, without any consideration, consultation and compensation to the local residents. This was very aptly described by Judy Magub as "Callous".

The essential concept of Honesty, Best Practice and Zero Harm does not seem to be applied to the unfortunate Mt Coot-tha Local Residents, who appear to be continually ignored by the BCC Aggregates department.
- Hence the Residents see a government announced quarry closure date, as the date when the quarry will close.
- The BCC Aggregates dept. sees the quarry as a jewel of Mt Coot-tha and the closure date as the date when they will investigate how the quarry life can be extended.
- AusRocks see the 2032 closure date as the date when the quarry will go underground to mine further.
- The Tourism sector sees the quarry as an ugly mine (that it is) and hence the closure date becomes the date when Mt Coot-tha will be set free to engage the million expected visitors every 3 months.
- The Economists see Mt Coot-tha as a unique world-class nature experience with income potential that far exceeds the meagre profit from the expensive task of blasting rock out of the ground.

DERM/EHP/DES Department Frustration:
For 600 blasts the Mt Coot-tha Quarry was operating with permanent blast vibration monitoring only done at the much further away locations Sussex St (SST) and Richer St(RST).
The vibration readings at these locations were much weaker which allowed the quarry to blast much stronger and still be within their allocated maximum.
The regulatory department (DERM) took no action to recify this error until November 2011 when John Higgins and Philip Best from the residents group were forced to intervene, in an effors to save their homes from damage.
Around blast 600, the quarry established a permanent monitoring location on Mt Coot-tha Road (159MCR) (aka #3SSGD) (aka Phil Best), and because the quarry continued to monitor at SST and RST the difference going forward could be calculated at approx one third as strong at SST and RST.
The residents had to run a series of RTI requests to get the data that they needed, but when they had all the data it was easy to run the stats and calculate the difference factor which indicates that the quarry could misrepresent their true blast vibration footprint to DERM/EHP/DES by a factor of 3 times.

For the sake of an extremely simple 15-minute measurement, nobody at DERM/EHP/DES or the quarry had no idea at all, about what was actually happening inside the residents homes, or at the SEQ Water-Grid Pipeline.
Both the DERM/EHP/DES and the Brisbane City Council Aggregates department had abandoned the residents and labelled them as a nuisance, when the residents were simply defending their own homes from damage.
Hence the residents themselves were foced to take the initiative and begin monitoring inside their own homes and at their own expense.

The results of the residents own monitoring showed that the internal noise generated by the ground vibrations shaking the house structure exceedes the maximum noise level by some 50dB.
However at the 2013 residents meeting, the DERM/EHP/DES department said that this was rubbish and that we had measured the blast Overpressure Sonic Boom. (This is totally incorrect because the sonic boom lasts for 1 or 2 sesonds, whilst the measured noise recorded in our home from the 3rd August 2016 blast lasted for more than 30 seconds.)
All the blast vibration levels that the residents recorded in their own homes is more than double the BCC Quarry reported 159MCR blast vibration values.

Hence the questions arise as to why the residents were forced to intervene, to create the 159MCR monitoring point and then later to do their own monitoring of both Noise and Vibration, at their own expense and in their own time, when there is a full time regulatory Qld Government department which is employed to enforce all breaches of the EPPR00447313 noise and vibration constraints.
Why is it when the EPPR regulations are very clearly written in a legally created government permit document, does the DERM/EHP/DES department repeatedly choose to ignore the facts and force their own bias on our data.
Both Standards Australia AS2187 Appendix J, and the British 1995 BS7385 Standard, have their primary function to protecting residential buildings.

The Extreme Quarry Frustration:
Hence the level of frustration with the Local Residents is extreme, especially for those who bought property here believing that the quarry was soon to close and then to find that the closure date was quietly and grossly extended.
And then on top of all this, the quarry blasting took advantage of new more-powerful explosives to more violently shake the local residents homes, even more than was done before the supposed closure date. So not only did the BCC change the closure date 3 times, but they also maintained their earlier (legacy) blasting license which was created back when the strength of explosives was much less.
- FOR THE 3 YEARS 2000-2002, THE QUARRY BLASTED AND CRUSHED MORE THAN 2 MILLION TONNES OF ROCK, RIGHT NEXT DOOR TO THE BOTANICAL GARDENS AND THE RESIDENTIAL AREA.
Plus the BCC management decided that the blast vibration monitoring company only establish permanent monitoring sites at much further away locations of Sussex St and Richer St. So they used this much further away (and therefore much weaker) vibration data as their EHP blast vibration footprint report, which is clearly despicable.
- For new residents excited to be in their own home, the discovery that the blast vibration reporting sites were nowhere near the homes opposite and closest to the quarry, plus the Key Resource Area KRA-42 had not set aside any blasting and processing separation zone for the residents homes, can only be described as a "worst nightmare come true".

Residents Group Work Done by John Higgins and David Brown:

Records from John Higgins documents suggests that the Residents Quarry Action Group began around the year 2000, when the quarry ramped up its blasting with the associated dust and noise.
We can see from the large amount of material generated after that time, that a huge amount of anxiety existed in the community with a corresponding amount of reactive work being done.
With the knowledge of the later work done, we estimated that more than 1000 hours work was done by each (David & John) before John died in 2016.
Ordinary honest residents (such as John Higgins) should never be forced, by their own local governent and in the last few precious years of their life, into doing this reactive kind of work (defending their own homes).

Residents Work Done by Philip Best:

In 2010 John Higgins appointed Philip Best as the Active Advocate and Engineer and since then approximately 2000 hours work has been done in learning about and probing the Mt Coot-tha Quarry.
The first thing done was to force the quarry into doing regular blast monitoring near the homes on Mt Coot-tha Road and closest to the quarry.
Three attempts were made to change the Australian Standard AS2187 in favour of a more balanced approach towards blast monitoring, however these were unsuccessful.
Several RTI Requests were done which provided the evidence that indicates very serious long-term misreporting of the blast vibration footprint by the Quarry to the State Government EHP department.
The volume of work done can be seen by the high file count plus the number of emails generated and received since 2010.
- However the intangible component is the time which is lost to performing these tasks plus the effect on the residents health.

BCC Pre-construction Signed Letter:

In February 2010 the BCC provided us with a formal letter signed by Chris Lange, Production Manager, Brisbane Infrastructure.
This letter stated that the Mt Coot-tha blast vibration levels are set to maintain "Quality of Life" and that the blast vibration levels set by their EPPR approval are much lower than what could ever damage a building.
This letter was circulated to John Higgins and all Local Residents.
In turn it was provided to engineers (who had no knowledge of blast vibrations), and they interpreted this as "no need for special considerations".
We were later to find out that the vibration measurements where our new homes were built were 3 or 4 times stronger than where the quarry was doing its monitoring.
Later again, after the residents paid for blast vibration measurements to be done inside a private home, the private home measurements were approximately 6 times the Sussex St permanent monitoring values at the time of this letter.
- So on the 15th November 2002 when the blast was measured as 10.11 mm/second at the Sussex St monitor, there is credible evidence to suggest that blast vibration levels inside the homes opposite the quarry may have been as high as 60 mm/second.
- This is some 12 times the ANZEC and QLD DERM/EHP/DES normal maximum and 30 times the ANZEC recommended long term Maximum and the QLD TMR Historic Building Maximum. - These are extremely serious earthquake conditions and will undoubtedly result in serious damage to homes.
- So whilst the quarry existed here before many residents, the quality and truthfulness of the facts supplied to them by the BCC before they bought property and/or began building, is vastly different to the reality of what is happening at the homes. Especially those closest to the blast zone.

Janet Spillman Mt Coot-tha Publication:

Ms Spillman published the book entitled Brisbane's Breathing Space: Mt Coot-tha, which is poublicaly available from the QLD Library.
This publication lists the history plus the fact that the Mt Coot-tha is preserved as a trust for the Brisbane residents and visitors.
The Mt Coot-tha Quarry (MCQ) was a pre-existing operation and hence was allowed to continue operation.

Looking Forward:

So where do the residents go to from here? Well we have to protect our homes against extra strong bast vibrations and subsequent damage.
So we work hard in what has become a full-time job for 2 years, investigating, uncovering, learning and reporting the truth.

So we say again: If the Brisbane Residents knew what their Brisbane City Council was doing to the very unfortunate local Mt Coot-tha residents, they would be both ashamed and outraged.
- And then they might wonder how the ratepayers will cover the cost of the gigantic open-cut mine hole "Brisbane"s Big Hole", only 4klm from the city and in the heart of Brisbane's biggest nature-based tourism precinct.

So what is the future of the "Brisbane's Big Hole".
- How much will the ratepayers be forced to pay, so that the hole can be "rehabilitated" when the quarry closes, or will it simply be left to rot like all the other mines?


Top of Page

MCLR and Website Scope   MCLR Work & Progress
Current Status - The Big Five;   The Big Five - More Details
DERM/EHP/DES Department Frustration   Extreme Quarry Frustration
Residents Group Work Done by John Higgins and David Brown
Residents Work Done by Philip Best BCC Signed Letter
Janet Spillman   Looking Forward