Raleigh Road Project to
Help City and Quarry Boom
Westgate Road is a vital artery allowing thousands of Raleigh
residents to travel daily from home to work and back again.
Raleigh-Durham Quarry is a busy granite operation that has
literally laid much of the groundwork behind the city’s decades
of growth.
In November, a road relocation was completed that will keep
both entities thriving for years to come.
Construction on the project kicked off more than a year ago,
but as Raleigh-Durham Plant Manager Matt Waligora said, its
origins date much further back.
“The company has owned land on both sides of Westgate Road
since the early 1990s and the plan has always been to expand the
quarry’s pit to the north,” he said.
Still, it wasn’t until 2010 that the idea to expand truly gained
traction. Two years later, after substantial analysis and planning,
the team in the Mid-Atlantic Division’s NC-East District
began what would become an extensive four-year permitting
process. Buzz Crosby, the district’s vice president-general
manager, said receiving the necessary permits took longer than
usual because the company worked diligently to meet the
standards of both the city and state while taking extra time to
ease any concerns held by area residents.
“The quarry has a tight footprint. There’s an interstate to its
north, industrial operations to its south and west and a sizable
residential area to its east,” he said. “The residents were the
most concerned and we went to great lengths to assure them
that the end result of this project would in no way affect their
quality of life.”
Waligora said a number of improvements have been made
to the road and surrounding utilities to make travel safer and
utility service more reliable.
“We’ve added a sidewalk along the north side of Westgate
Road and graded the land to allow for an easy transformation
from two lanes to four if that’s what the city and state decide to
do,” he said, adding that large berms will soon be constructed
on Martin Marietta property to shield neighboring homes from
the quarry’s operations.
The project also involved the construction of a bridge allowing
vehicles as large as a 70-ton haul truck to safely pass beneath
Westgate Road. Martin Marietta employees previously seeking to
access the land had to drive road-appropriate vehicles through
traffic to do so.
While the $5.6 million road relocation project has created
great public benefits and improved all-around safety, it also has
opened up significant granite reserves and land to store overburden,
Crosby said, adding that the undertaking’s true impact
extends much further.
“The project will make Raleigh-Durham Quarry a better,
stronger operation for the future,” he said. “We will have multiple
areas to mine, which will improve the quality of our product and
allow us to work more efficiently. As a result, we’ll be able to
better serve the community for a much longer period of time.” ▼
An aerial view of Raleigh-Durham Quarry during
the project’s construction phase. Now completed,
the new Westgate Road runs along the arched stretch
of dirt above the quarry’s pit. Martin Marietta
will eventually turn the new road over to the North
Carolina Department of Transportation.
The Westgate Road relocation project included
construction of a bridge large enough for a 70-ton
haul truck to pass beneath.
PHOTO BY MATT WALIGORA
8 November/December 2017 The Conveyor | www.martinmarietta.com
/www.martinmarietta.com