ROCKLAND, Maine — Officials are working on a plan that could lead to four abandoned quarries in Rockland being filled.
The project would lead to more land being made available for development and would reduce safety hazards from the former limestone quarries that are located along Old County Road, south of the city’s solid waste operations.
The Rockland City Council is expected to meet to discuss the proposal, although a date has yet to be scheduled.
The city owns the four quarries and is using a fifth adjacent quarry to dispose of demolition debris. That fifth pit is expected to be filled in several years.
The proposal calls for having the Dragon Products cement plant in neighboring Thomaston fill the other four quarries with “shot rock,” the unusable rock remaining from mining operations at Dragon. The company already has filled with shot rock the quarries it owns on Old County Road that are adjacent to the Rockland-owned ones.
Interim City Manager Tom Luttrell said that he and David St. Laurent, solid waste director, had talked about such a proposal back in 2011 when Luttrell was interim city manager the first time. There was no movement on the proposal over the next few years, but he and St. Laurent revived talks when Luttrell became interim manager a second time a little more than a year ago.
There are two main reasons behind the proposal, Luttrell said. Once the quarries are filled, there would be additional land in Rockland that could be used for development.
But filling the quarries also would address a long-standing safety concern. The quarries, some which are 400 feet deep, run along busy but narrow Old County Road.
In January 2005, a woman died when her sports utility vehicle plunged into a quarry along Old County Road. That accident marked the six death since 1962 involving vehicles going into the quarries along Old County Road, according to BDN archives.
In July 2013, a woman who had been sitting on the edge of a quarry in Rockland had to be rescued when she slipped and slid about 25 to 30 feet down an embankment and could not climb back out on her own.
Luttrell has no timetable established, but he said it would take years to fill the quarries once the process began. He said the city had communicated with officials at the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, who indicated there should be no regulatory problem with such fill. Dragon would need to modify the permit it received to fill its own quarries, Luttrell added.
A telephone message left Wednesday with the cement plant’s general manager was not immediately returned.
The quarries were used to mine limestone that was used for mortar and plaster in the 1800s and early 1900s.
According to the Rockland Historical Society, there was a bridge at one time that extended across one of the quarries, leading from Pleasant Street to Old County Road. The bridge was well-known locally because President William Howard Taft was pictured giving a speech there in 1910.