A birthday in Taranaki

For Taranaki quarryman Russell Vickers his business has been a bit like his marriage – built on the rock-solid tenants of trust, integrity and generosity for over 50 years.   BY NEIL RITCHIE.

Earlier this year, when industry patriarch Russell Vickers (right) first thought of holding some celebrations to mark Vickers Quarries’ half century thoughts of his then recently deceased wife Marie came flooding back.

However, he pressed on out of respect for her and the company’s celebrations in mid-March attracted more than 150 people from all over the North Island.

There were people from the quarrying, mining, roading, trucking, construction and engineering industries, as well as bulk material agents, equipment suppliers and local, regional and central government representatives.

Many spoke of the company’s commitment to good environmental practices and the respect the Taranaki community and New Zealand quarrying industry have for the Vickers family because of their business ethics.

Vickers also mentioned his late wife several times, telling the guests that he could not have set up and run such a successful quarrying business without her.

“If it were not for her, there would be no quarries,” he told the crowd.

“As well as raising two boys and four girls, she milked the cows and ran the farm while I was away playing with the toys and, later, with my boys when they joined me in the quarrying business,” said Vickers, referring to his adult sons Kevin and Noddy.

Now in his seventies, he and his wife founded Vickers Quarries on the family farm off York Road, Midhirst soon after they were married in 1958.

And it proved to be an almost ideal location for a quarry, one of the best supplies of metal in Taranaki, which was no surprise really as further up the Mangonui River are remnants of an old quarry and crusher run by the Works Department, which in the early 1900s supplied ballast for the New Zealand Railways’ North Egmont branch railway line that operated there between 1906 and 1941.

“That’s near where we now mine our raw material, immediately upstream from the York quarry and crusher.

“There is almost an endless supply and I doubt we will ever work it all out – I know that from experience, it’s a consistent depth wherever you dig,” Vickers adds.

As well as the York Road quarry, the company also owns and operates the nearby Toko quarry, which has its own crusher and is fully self-contained.

A recent GNS Science survey of quarry rock concluded York Rd has the best quality rock in Taranaki and the best reserves.GNS Science believes the layer currently being mined by Vickers Quarries came down in a lahar when the cone of Mt Taranaki collapsed about 13,000 years ago.

At first, the family business was based on providing many of the raw materials for local roads, though that has changed over the years so that now there are over 20 different products, ranging from fine sand to 30-tonne boulders.

Vickers Quarries also supplies a large quantity of rocks of all sizes for seawalls, harbour protection, river bank protection, moles or decorative landscaping.

A lot of its products go to the greater Wellington region, with prominent projects including the feature stone of Waitangi Park next to the national museum Te Papa.

The company currently has about 1100 customers on its database, with the single biggest client being Allied Concrete, which uses a variety of sands and metal chip products at various locations. 

“We have a good product range and carry huge stockpiles – hundreds of thousands of tonnes of big boulders just lying there that don’t devalue or deteriorate.

“Our principal aim is to give the customers what they want and it’s our customers who judge whether we are providing what they need or not,” says Vickers.

And the golden anniversary year for Vickers Quarries was also one of record production. The company was “just shy” of achieving 250,000 tonnes of product for the March 31, 2009 financial year; all produced by “four-and-a-half” men – Kevin, Noddy, two others and “the half”, as Vickers describes himself these days.

Also during that time it outlaid $1.6 million in capital investments, principally purchasing, importing and installing one of the two largest crushers in New Zealand at its York Road quarry – a Kawasaki 60x48 DT Jaw Crusher capable of crushing boulders up to 1.5 metres thick.

The company also takes care of the environment surrounding its quarries – doing substantial works over the years at some cost to itself, including putting in stopbanks, planting hundreds of flaxes and other native shrubs, as well river protection and flood reinstatement work.

Russell told Q&M that few people recognised the essential nature of quarrying in New Zealand and around the world, with virtually nothing being able to be built or constructed without the industry.

The average house requires about 250 tonnes of aggregates during construction, every kilometre of road needs 400 tonnes of aggregates, while motorways need up to 20,000 tonnes of various aggregates per kilometre, he says.

Taranaki’s volcanic lahar rock is well known to have a lower crushing strength than that from most other regions, due to the extent of air cavities (vesiculation) that may make up to 30 percent of the volume of the rock.

The National Roads Board, now part of the NZ Transport Agency, recognised the unique characteristics of Taranaki’s volcanic rock and relaxed the crushing strength test requirement for the region’s andesite from 100 to 85 kilonewtons.

Customers are happy with the lower crushing strength metal. “You may have to use a thicker layer in roading to make the pavement last a little longer but, as they say, a good contractor will make good roads out of so called bad metal and vice versa.”

Vickers Quarries has been a member of the New Zealand Contractors’ Federation for 34 years, the Institute of Quarrying in New Zealand (IOQNZ) for 27 years and the Aggregate and Quarry Association of New Zealand.

Russell was president of IOQNZ from 2001-03 and during that time he was one of those quarrymen keen to get New Zealand Quarrying & Mining magazine (as Q&M was called then) started.

“The Australians wanted an Aussie mag to be the official magazine of the Kiwi quarrying and mining industry, but Brian Bouzaid and I wanted New Zealand to have its own publication.

“At the 2001 conference in Auckland, we discussed the possibility of setting up our own magazine and by chance I met Phil Whyte, the then editor of Contractor magazine. He was very warm on the idea and others were only too willing to come onboard.”

With Vicker’s encouragement, Quarrying & Mining was first published five years ago by Contrafed Publishing.

“So in some ways, this magazine was our brainchild as we were instrumental in getting it started, and from the feedback I get

from around the country, it fills a very interesting gap in the contracting sector and has become very dear to me.”