Posted: Monday, July 7, 2008 12:00 am | Updated: 5:22 pm, Thu Apr 12, 2012.

By Carrie Ann Knauer,Times Staff Writer

Company hasn’t yet provided details on how it will move rock from New Windsor to Union Bridge

UNION BRIDGE — Lehigh Cement Co. officials are not ready to discuss details for how they plan to move rock quarried in New Windsor to the Union Bridge plant, but they are sharing information about a rock crusher they plan to install in New Windsor.

Lehigh officials gave about a dozen members of the New Windsor Community Action Project, or NEWCAP, a tour of the Union Bridge quarry’s rock crusher last week. Several members of the group had raised concerns at public meetings with Lehigh officials that a rock crusher would be loud and dusty and have a negative effect on residences surrounding the quarry.

The rock crusher at the Union Bridge quarry has been in operation since 1957, said Lehigh mining engineer Joe Risley, and has about a 1,100-ton-per-day capacity for crushing rocks that come out of the quarry.

Dump trucks that can carry 100 tons of material haul chunks of stone blasted out of the quarry to a hopper at the rock crusher, Risley said. The crusher uses a gyrating method to crush the rock into smaller pieces, trying to create stones no larger than 4 inches in diameter, he said.

The tour van stopped about half a mile from the rock crusher and let the participants out to hear the sound it made. Risley asked NEWCAP members what they could hear. They answered trucks and a slight mechanical humming.

“The biggest environmental nuisance is the trucks themselves, not the crushing,” Risley said.

One hundred yards outside the building, Risley described the crushing and screening process the rock undergoes, speaking loudly to compete with the rock crushing but not having to yell.

The tour continued into the rock crusher building, where participants had to wear earplugs and a sign warned that the decibel level could be 95 dBA.

The proposed rock crusher for New Windsor would be able to reduce 2,500 tons of stone per hour, more than twice the size of the Union Bridge operation, Risley said. The size is increased because the New Windsor facility would only operate from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m., he said, whereas the Union Bridge facility does not have those restrictions. More rock will need to be crushed in a shorter period of time, he said.

Also, the New Windsor rock crusher is proposed to be further recessed in the quarry than the one in Union Bridge, Risley said.

“It would not be visible from Old New Windsor Road,” he said.

NEWCAP President George Maloney said he was glad to have access to the facility and to be able to ask more questions.

“I feel better that we’re being able to see it,” Maloney said.

NEWCAP member Dan Strickler said he still would have liked to learn more about Lehigh’s plans for transporting the crushed New Windsor stone to Union Bridge but was happy for the information he did receive.

“It’s always interesting to get a new update on what’s going on,” he said.