By Sparky Smith
Aspdin Road
Resident and Business Owner
People in the area may not know that our tourism and Skeleton Lake, Lake Rosseau and Lake Joseph are under threat.
The Township of Muskoka Lakes is considering a rezoning application which would allow the establishment of a rock/gravel quarry and pit at 1089 Butler Mill Road. Butler Mill Road is a dead-end road located between Huntsville and Rosseau, close to Skeleton Lake.
The proposed Pit and Quarry operation would be allowed to take out 200,000 tonnes of sand, gravel and bedrock annually.
According to a traffic study dated January 2017 the average number of truck trips in and out of the road would be seven an hour, with 14 an hour at maximum production. Obviously, all of those trucks will head either east to Huntsville, or west to Rosseau.That’s a huge amount of heavy-truck traffic for Aspdin Road to handle.
In addition to the disruption due to the increase in noise and traffic there is an ecological issue as well. At 100 metres deep in its centre, our ‘Impact Crater’ Lake is very unique. It is spring fed and uniquely clear. The damage of blasting could forever remove this amazing lake, which runs into Lake Rosseau and Lake Joseph
Our experience with quarries is specific. We lived in Washago with a quarry several miles away. It is not as large as the one being proposed yet every day the ground shook the house when they blasted. However, that was nothing compared to the damage to the road, which could not be maintained because of poor planning on the town’s part. When the road developed potholes because of the heavy trucks the noise became unbearable. The trucks would rattle so loud it was impossible to ignore, like a shotgun by your ear as the back-end loaders banged against their mounting. In the summer, Aspdin is a very busy road with tourist traffic travelling within the region. If this quarry is approved, the serene drive may look like Toronto during rush hour.
For more information and links to the Township of Muskoka Lakes rezoning application please visit STOP MUSKOKA PIT.
To sign the petition – Stop the Lippa Pit and Quarry – which presently has 497 signatures, click here.
Please attend the Township meeting where the application will be discussed.
Township of Muskoka Lakes Council Meeting
For Consideration of the Lippa Pit & Quarry Application
When: Friday June 16, 2017 at 9:00am
Where: Council Chambers, Municipal Office
1 Bailey Street, Port Carling
(intersection of Bailey St. and Joseph St.)
Follow STOP MUSKOKA PIT on Facebook, and on Twitter.
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This is an environmental disaster!!
Sadly, if my experience is anything to go by, you are wasting your time talking to Municipal planning about this pit.
In Lake of Bays they did nothing at all to ensure consideration of concerns raised by long time businesses and residents when local pits expanded exponentially with the overlaying of the Pits and Quarries Act from the Ontario Government about 10 years ago. The local municipality just “vanished” from the scene, no comment and no action.
District was no more visible and their road gets pounded to death by the heavy trucks that it was not built to withstand.
The truckers themselves are generally very courteous and as helpful as they can be but there is only so much one can do with a 30 ton truck on a road with no shoulders. These things are not built to be quiet.
This Aggregate act is there, not to protect existing people and land uses that may have existed for over 100 years, no it is there to insure that the gravel flows and the gravel lobbyists objectives are met and they do a great job of this.
A minor secondary objective is to collect fees for the government too, but then that objective seems to be general to all parts of government these days.