Can a quarry and NC state park make good neighbors? Two views from across Crabtree Creek

“But in all of them they acknowledge it’s close to 400 trucks going by here a day,” she says.

Spooner acknowledges that Wake County needs the kind of rock that Wake Stone proposes to mine. But she notes that are seven other quarries in Wake County.

“So I don’t disagree that the market needs the quarries,” she said. “What I disagree with is that it needs this quarry.”

‘A good location’ for a rock quarry

Sam Bratton was 6 years old, the youngest of seven children, when his father acquired land near Knightdale and began mining stone in 1970. Wake Stone remains a family business; Sam’s two older brothers, John and Ted, each took a turn running the company, and he has been president since 2009, adding CEO to his title in 2020.

Bratton, 59, remembers helping to survey the land that would become the Triangle Quarry in the early 1980s. He was studying industrial relations at UNC-Chapel Hill, and remembers the site was pretty remote, with a couple of houses and a fishing shack on a pond.

But Bratton says his father knew that I-40 and the North Harrison Avenue interchange were about to open, connecting the fast-growing state capital with Research Triangle Park.

“I guess he had some vision and could see this was going to be a good location to provide the building materials for all the growth that was coming,” he said.

At 222 acres, the Triangle Quarry site is the smallest of Wake Stone’s five quarries, including the company’s 600-acre flagship in Knightdale.

Still, the size and depth of the hole in the ground between I-40 and the park is startling the first time you approach the rim. The pit covers 90 acres, and the floor where workers blast and scoop up big chunks of gray granite gneiss is now 500 feet from the top.

The pit on the smaller Odd Fellows property would be a little more than half as big and not quite as deep. Creating a 55-acre quarry from scratch normally wouldn’t make financial sense, Bratton says.

But Wake Stone plans to use the crushing and processing equipment that’s already in place at the Triangle Quarry, by building a bridge over the creek that separates the two properties. So far, that bridge has been a sticking point, after an administrative law judge blocked an environmental permit the company needs to build it.

Bratton says the company expects to prevail on that issue. It also hopes to win over the public to the idea that it would be better for the environment overall to continue processing rock at the Triangle Quarry than to find it somewhere farther away and truck it in.

Bratton doesn’t spend nearly as much time in Umstead as Spooner but says he has hiked there, particularly along the Company Mill Trail that’s just across the creek from his quarry. In the winter, with the leaves off the trees, he can look down on Crabtree Creek, the dividing line with the park, from the access road around the pit.

Umstead is an “urban park,” he says, subject to noise from highways and the airport.

“It is not Yellowstone,” he said. “But it’s a great amenity for the community. And it’s something that certainly needs to be protected. But it doesn’t need to be protected from us.”

A ‘wonderful relationship’ that has soured

Bratton and Spooner disagree not only about the idea of a quarry next to Umstead but also on countless details.

Bratton notes, for example, that a company study of how noise would affect the park determined the quarry wouldn’t be heard above what already comes from I-40 and RDU. Spooner counters that the study didn’t account for the loss of trees and hills on the Odd Fellows property that would increase the sound of traffic from the highway.

Bratton says Wake Stone had a “wonderful relationship” with Spooner and the Umstead Coalition up until the company announced that it wanted to expand.

“It’s just bothersome,” he said. “There weren’t any blasting complaints. There weren’t any complaints about anything until we announced that.”

Spooner says that relationship has been strained at best, even at the time she wrote that letter in 1999.

She says the Umstead Coalition strongly opposed the Triangle Quarry before it was allowed to open in the early 1980s and had assumed a 50-year sunset clause in the company’s mining permit would force it to close in 2031.

But the company got that clause removed from the permit in 2018, allowing it to continue mining as long as there’s rock to process. The coalition has contested that decision by state regulators, and the N.C. Office of Administrative Hearings is scheduled to hear arguments in June.

Meanwhile, Bratton says Wake Stone won’t begin cutting trees and moving dirt on the Odd Fellows property until it can build the bridge across Crabtree Creek. On Monday, an administrative law judge affirmed the state’s decision to issue a permit for the 60-foot-wide bridge, but the Umstead Coalition will appeal to Wake County Superior Court, Spooner says.

Bratton said the company will do what’s necessary to comply with state regulations.

“We believe we’ve done everything we’ve needed to do to mitigate concerns, to minimize impacts and to make sure that we’ve been sensitive to the concerns of the state and the public and the park,” he said. “We feel good about our record; we feel good about our ability to be in regulatory compliance. And we’re amazed that this is as big an issue as it is.”