What is a Limestone Quarry?

In Florida and elsewhere, communities need Stone to be crushed and used as the foundation for roads, and this crushed stone is also used for the creation of cement or concrete.

Concrete and steel buildings are a superior building methodology – therefore highly desirable in a state like Florida where high winds – as we've just experienced – are routine.

The entire state of Florida has a giant Limestone karst formation running down the center of it, and in fact this Limestone karst formation is the reason Florida is even here – above sea level.

When miners begin digging out the Limestone and putting it through crushing machines, they encounter the aquifer, or underground water table, when they dig down approximately 40 or 50 feet.

This subsurface series of water “layer” formations runs beneath all the land and so when miners dig down below this line, the hole they are digging fills up with water. In our particular case our quarry is ringed with 40 foot limestone cliffs, with a lake that is 55 deep at the center and 30 feet deep at the edges and has approximately 250 million gallons of water in it. It took the miners, using less powerful machinery than used today, over 50 years, from 1925 through 1975, to excavate Haile Quarry.

To continue to get the rock then – the miners use a giant machine called a dragline that has a huge clamshell on the end, so that after the miners drill into the cliff walls and mine them with dynamite (or today plastic explosive) and then “Boom” there is an explosion, the rock falls down into the water, and is pulled out by the dragline machine, loaded on trucks, and taken away to be crushed into the material that is used to make either concrete or road base.

The video below is of the dragline operation next door!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sSWO1J2m2k2dOj8P_ogeh441zy31jpPy/view?usp=drive_link