Judge rescinds permit for quarry bridge over Crabtree Creek near Umstead State Park
A state agency erred when it authorized a mining company to disturb the banks of Crabtree Creek to build a bridge just upstream of Umstead State Park, a judge ruled this week.
The Division of Water Quality failed to show that it had considered alternatives to the proposed bridge, wrote administrative law judge Michael C. Byrne. The bridge would connect an existing stone quarry adjacent to the park with one that Wake Stone Corp. hopes to open on land leased from Raleigh-Durham International Airport.
Wake Stone proposed building a 60-foot-wide bridge, large enough to allow 65-ton mining trucks, roughly twice the size of normal dump trucks, to cross going in opposite directions at the same time. The company’s president and CEO, Sam Bratton, told the judge that a single-lane bridge would not be able to handle “hundreds of loads” crossing each day, according to Byrne’s ruling.
Building foundations for the bridge would destroy 12,000 square feet of riparian buffer, the vegetative area along Crabtree Creek that state law says should be maintained to protect water quality in the Neuse River basin. The state can allow a company or property owner to disturb a buffer area, which is what it did at Wake Stone’s request in June 2020.
But the Umstead Coalition, which has been fighting the quarry on RDU land, appealed the decision, saying the Division of Water Quality didn’t consider alternatives. Specifically, the law requires the state to determine that there’s no way the bridge “cannot practically be reduced in size or density, reconfigured or redesigned to better minimize disturbance, preserve aquatic life and habitat, and protect water quality.”
After reviewing the state’s decision and holding a hearing in February, Byrne agreed and rescinded the permit.
Wake Stone can appeal the judge’s ruling to Superior Court or seek a new permit. Bratton said the company hasn’t decided.
“We are assessing our options and have not determined a course of action but will be proceeding with the quarry expansion,” he wrote in an email.
Wake Stone is seeking a mining permit to develop an open pit mine on 105 acres it has leased from RDU. Stone from the 400-foot-deep mine would be trucked across the bridge to the company’s existing quarry off North Harrison Avenue, where it would be crushed and washed and trucked out to customers.
The Umstead Coalition and others sued the company and RDU, saying the airport’s governing board did not have the authority to lease property for a quarry. A Wake County judge and the state Court of Appeals both ruled the lease is legal, and this summer the state Supreme Court let those decisions stand.
The Umstead Coalition is now trying a different strategy. The group’s leader, Jean Spooner, has asked the secretary of the Department of Environmental Quality, Elizabeth Biser, to require an independent study of the quarry’s potential environmental impacts on Umstead. Spooner calls the proposed quarry “perhaps the biggest environmental disaster to a North Carolina state park in decades.”
