Mt Coot-tha Quarry History of Significant Events - 2010-2011
2010
24th February
Chris Lange, Asphalt Production Manager, sends a personally signed letter to Philip Best stating that the Blasting limits are set for
"Quality of Life" and are much lower than would be expected to cause damage to homes.
This letter was then used by our new house project RPEQ engineers (who had no knowledge of mining blast vibration)
to consider that no special blast vibration design aspects needed to be considered.
The letter was also provided to other residents and used for the same purpose.
2011 The Legacy Way construction began in April 2011. This project continued to emit loud noise both day and night throughout 2011. This was in addition to the normal quarry Blasting.
29th August
After doing significant research: "Philip Best advises DERM that continued Blasting over a long period of time
will cause damage to dwellings and other private domestic structures."
He also asks more questions to further probe the monitoring and assessment procedure.
After we made the required payment, DERM provided the actual Quarry DA IPDE00920708_SR0041 to us (now EPPR00447313).
For the first time we can see what the Quarry and DERM have not told us about -
"The blast vibration maximum is not legally defined on every 10th blast".
DERM emails their standard list of example "Noise Sensitive Places". We note that a Private Dwelling such
as our home, is Top of the List.
It therefore follows that the Mt Coot-tha Quarry DA Blasting conditions are primarily focussed at maintaining
blast vibration maaimums "IN or ON any PRIVATE DWELLING".
After liaising with Andrew Fraser, Philip Best Lays it on the Line to DERM - we need a government backed assurance
that Mt Coot-tha Quarry Blasting is not damaging our homes.
This led to the creation of a permanent vibration monitoring point at the unused address "159 Mt Coot-tha Road"quot;.
After several complaionts from the local residents, the EHP department forced the Mt Coot-tha Quarry into conductng
permanent monitoring at the (unused) location of 159 Mt Coot-tha Rd.
This was the first time that any permanent monitoring was established for the homes closest to the quarry.
The results provided proved that the previous blast monitoring was only measuring vibrations that were approx
one third of the strength.
W=This then indicated that the blast vibration footprint reporting was misrepresented for 600 blasts.