Inside Hawaii's Biggest Quarry
By Ken Sakamoto, Star-Bulletin
A 50-ton truck is loaded with rocks for delivery to the crusher, where boulders up to 5 tons are broken down.
For nearly 50 years, this Windward facility has been quietly going about the noisy business of quarrying
By Peter Wagner
Star-BulletinThere's no way to hide a 416-acre quarry, though Ameron HC&D has tried everything from Norfolk Pines to green paint at its Kapaa Quarry. The scarred hillside, overlooking Kawainui Marsh in Kailua, sticks out in the lush landscape like a sore thumb.
"We make quite an effort to make it as soft and pleasing as we can," said quarry manager George West.
Water trucks ply the 55-acre pit, fighting dust. Seismometers read each blast, about 100 a week, to keep tremors to a minimum. And dirt scraped away to expose raw rock is later laid back on the benched hillside to plant trees and shrubs.
The quarry has a landscaped cabana overlooking the 165-foot-deep pit, where school children and senior citizens pause on guided tours of Kapaa.
Camouflage and public relations weren't necessary when the company, then Honolulu Construction & Draying Co. Ltd., took a lease on the Campbell Estate property in 1949. Nor was a state conservation district permit, granted in 1966, two years after land use controls were established.
By Ken Sakamoto, Star-Bulletin
Rodney Maunakea pours ammonium nitrate - the stuff that brought down the federal building in Oklahoma City - into a hole for blasting.
Tucked into a caldera behind the huge marsh, Kapaa was remote from the urban pressure that drove HC&D from Moiliili. Sleepy Kailua was 45 minutes across the Koolaus, off a narrow road that wound through vine-draped forests, over a windy summit and around hairpin turns to reach the rural countryside.Then came the Pali tunnels, a flood of development, and a freeway running straight through the quarry.
"It brought the whole world right through our living room," said West of the H-3 segment that since the mid-1970s has given commuters a close look at Windward Oahu's only heavy industry.
But while the quarry straddles Pahukini heiau and 20 years ago mined its way through an ancient adze quarry, it has stirred little controversy.
"We really don't have a lot of pressure," said Ameron President Bob Wilkinson. "Every once in a while someone will see some things they don't like but basically we're pretty much hidden and we try be very quiet and a good neighbor."
One of two quarries operated by Ameron in Hawaii, Kapaa is the biggest in the state. Other quarries on Oahu include Grace Pacific at Makakilo and Hawaiian Cement at Halawa Valley.
Ameron, an international company headquartered in Pasadena, Calif., operates under terms of its Campbell Estate lease and two conservation district permits issued by the state Department of Land and Natural Resources. Federal and state environmental laws regulate noise, air, and water quality.
About 1.5 million tons of basalt came from Kapaa last year, a slow year because of slow construction. Production peaked at 3 million tons in 1991, when Ameron had 364 employees in Hawaii. But with business down 40 percent, nearly half of Ameron's work force has been laid off.
Gross revenues dropped from about $100 million in 1991 to $60 million last year, company officials say.
Still, 50-ton trucks rumble between the pit and a row of rock crushing plants in a steady procession, sometimes long into the night. "Powder crews" drop ammonium nitrate - the stuff that brought down the federal building in Oklahoma City - into deep holes to lay open piles of broken stone. Awesome "cone crushers" reduce 5-ton boulders to 5-pound "surge rock," and an array of carefully screened rock sizes down to a fine grain called "mansand" for concrete mix.
The man-made sand became necessary after a statewide moratorium on beach mining in 1975.
The north side of the Kapaa caldera has been carved down in a series of circular "benches" that surround the pit. Some 30 million tons of rock have come from the pit so far, with about seven million tons remaining.
Rock is something Hawaii has relied upon far more than mainland states, where steel is easier to come by. Shipping costs until recent years kept steel a rarity in high-rise construction here.
But steel has taken a bite out of the rock business in recent years, with construction of the First Hawaiian Center downtown, Neiman-Marcus at Ala Moana Center, the nearby state Convention Center, and the upcoming Kalia Tower project in Waikiki.
High-rises in Hawaii have predominantly been made of high-stress concrete. It's still a popular alternative, as seen at the Hawaiki Tower project under construction on Piikoi Street, One Archer Lane on King Street and Ward Avenue, and Kulana Hale on Beretania Street and Kalakaua Avenue. But odd-shaped structures like the Convention Center and First Hawaiian Center lend themselves to steel, architects say. And steel structures are faster to build, if allowances are made for shipping delays.
A huge hit was taken by the quarry last year when the H-3 freeway was completed. Kapaa quarry poured 800,000 tons of rock into the biggest public works project in the state's history.
The current quarry site has about three to five years of life remaining, West said. But Ameron is looking to a long future on the outskirts of Kailua. Across the freeway is a 152-acre hillside, the other side of the caldera, where 75 million tons of blue rock lie beneath the clay - a 50-year supply.
Plans are to run a conveyor belt beneath the freeway to carry rock from the new quarry to the rattle bang crushing plant.
