Digging deep in Lynchburg’s largest quarry, where the rock is about to run out

Silence surrounds the Lawyer’s Road quarry for just a few minutes a week during the workday bustle.

Two warning sirens sound to ensure workers clear the pit. Then, “fire in the hole” crackles over a hand-held radio.

A rumble lasting less than a second, felt only below the knee, vibrates through the ground and a spurt of boulders cleaves off a 50-foot rock face. It sounds like a 25,000-ton tower of wooden blocks tumbling to the floor.

The Boxley Aggregates quarry on Lawyers Road has been operating since 1965, but the slender geologic deposit of bluish-gray marble the company mines there gradually is running out.

Company officials estimate only about 15 years worth of rock remain and soon it will be time to find a new site.

Three years ago, Boxley purchased a 914-acre swath of land in Evington, off Virginia 24, about a mile east of Leesville Road. It’s about 6 miles from the Lawyers Road site as the crow flies.

Buried beneath a 100-acre portion of that site, Boxley officials said, is a clean deposit of greenstone, a dense rock suitable for construction materials. If approved, rock mining in a rural section of Campbell County could begin in 15 years.

Boxley and its supporters say keeping a quarry operating in the area is crucial to local economic development. Furthermore, it will keep costs lower for construction materials for buildings, houses and roads in Central Virginia.

But neighbors and area residents fear an industrial operation such as a quarry could change the community’s character forever.

In addition to worries about noise, dust and traffic, some residents fear the blasting could impact their wells. Their underlying concern is the impact on their quality of life.

A public hearing before the Campbell County Board of Supervisors is slated for Oct. 6.

History of the rock
About 550 million years ago, limestone deposits formed in a shallow ocean. Over time, it was heated, compressed and changed into bluish-gray marble that’s mined from the Lawyers Road quarry, said Tom Roller, a geologist and Boxley’s director of technical services. Directly behind the quarry is a hill made of quartzite, which is made from heated and compressed sand, Roller said. He describes that hill as the beach beside the marble’s ocean.

“This is a really good rock,” Roller said. “We’ve looked for more deposits of this rock but there are none of this size.”

State geological maps show that a fault created millions of years ago shut off the Lawyers Road vein near the eastern edge of Boxley’s property and shifted it during gradual earth movements.

Evington’s greenstone was formed from volcanic eruptions, Roller said. While it’s more common throughout the region, most deposits also have layers of transformed volcanic ash mixed in, which soften the rock and renders it unusable for construction materials, Roller said. What makes the Evington deposit so unique is that it’s free of those intrusions, Roller said.

Of the proposed Evington quarry, Perkins said that while Boxley owns more than 900 acres there, the size of the usable deposit is about 100 acres in the parcel south of Virginia 24. Depending on how much rock is mined, that deposit will last about 100 years, said Jeff Perkins, Boxley’s aggregate division’s executive vice president.

While there will be a stone-crushing plant on site, the majority of the land will be kept as open space to buffer the operation from the community, Perkins said.

“We have looked at 18 sites that we actually walked and drilled holes,” Perkins said, “and none of them were feasible for a quarry.”

Mining of rock
Back at Lawyers Road, the company blasts every week to 10 days, depending on orders, to ensure a steady supply is available. The rock is crushed into varying sizes and used for construction projects throughout the area. One size is sold for asphalt paving. Another is used for making gravel to go under foundations. The company even smashes rocks down into sand-sized pieces for making concrete.

Standing on the rim of the pit back at the Lawyers Road quarry, the rock shimmers in the sun. A front-end loader dumps dozens of tons of rock into several dump trucks, which make a constant hauling circuit in and out of the pit. Above, the trucks seem like toys; at eye level, they are enormous.

Inside the pit, sharp sheets of marble jut out from the walls. Occasional groundwater seeps stain the face.

Water required for the quarry and rock crushing operation is captured from rainfall and recycled.

The bedrock mined lies about 20 feet below the soil’s surface. When starting a new section or quarry, workers must excavate down before the rock can be blasted.

Exposed rock faces in the 80-acre Lawyers Road pit are blown off in relatively small amounts. Each week, explosives experts with whom Boxley contracts survey a small section of the rock face as part of the planning for the next blast.

The experts drill holes 30 to 50 feet down into the rock and put in a mix of ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel to create the explosive mix that will blow off a part of the wall. It’s crucial to make sure the holes, which vary in quantity depending on the size of the blast, are a specific distance from the edge. If it’s too close, it sends the blasted rock flying out, Perkins said. “If it’s too far back, it sends the vibrations back into the neighborhood and that’s not what we want.”

Once the rock is blown off the wall, it’s gradually loaded into dump trucks and hauled out of the pit. It’s then dumped into the first crusher, which breaks gigantic boulders down. Those pieces are then sent to the processing plant, where they are screened and crushed into different sizes for various uses.

The company currently pumps rainwater out of the pit to keep mining operations open, but when the quarry reaches the end of its life, the hole will hold about 6 billion gallons of water, Perkins said. “The nice thing about this quarry is it might be considered as a long-term water source for the county as a reservoir.”