Tuesday, 7 March 2023

Aggregate Industries’ Moorcroft Quarry in the news again

In 2021, we posted that Moorcroft Quarry in Plymstock, was yet another AI quarry in Devon failing to control dust emissions. This time it’s a story in the Plymouth Herald, by the paper’s crime reporter: 


Whatever the rights and wrongs of the story, Aggregate Industries has clearly failed to effectively communicate its intentions to the local community. One angry resident told PlymouthLive: 
The trees along the border have been there for decades - they're really tall and lush in summer and create a natural curtain which muffles a lot of the noise from the quarry. There's a big operation just on the other side and they start work early and it can be really noisy sometimes, so the curtain of trees has been a real benefit to the street. 

But when we saw how many trees they were cutting down, we've been utterly appalled. It's an absolute haven for wildlife. At night you can hear owls hooting, I've seen rabbits and foxes and a few years ago I even saw a herd of deer racing along the top. You even see birds of prey on the upper branches. We all know there's a great big quarry on the other side, but for most of the year you can look at it an imagine it's the edge of a vast beautiful forest. 

They didn't even bother to let the residents know and it looks like they've gone berserk with chainsaws, chopping down perfectly healthy trees. Of course, they'll claim they're all sick or something, but if you look at Google Street View's images of it in May 2022 you can see the majority are perfectly healthy and lush. It's just vandalism - plain and simple. It's the absolute arrogance of these big firms to steam in and hack away at nature which is so galling.
The firm must restock the felled area before June 2029. Another angry resident said: 
We'll be watching very closely to see if they do what they've been told to, because they've left it looking like a battle scene out of Apocalypse Now. They've ripped the guts out of the woods and it looks bloody awful. It'll take decades to return to the lush state it was in before the chainsaws came and the wildlife may never return. 
Aggregate Industries once bragged about its community engagement around Moorcroft Quarry: 
No other quarry of our 87 across the UK needs to have active and effective community engagement more than Moorcroft.  

In our situation we wouldn’t be here if we didn’t listen to our neighbours. Community engagement is a long process of talking, listening and presenting a known face. Even if it’s bad news, we tell them because, if we don’t, they’ll just make up their own stories. 
Hollow words.

EDIT 13.3.23
 
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