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Greenspring Quarry Plan Closer |
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Columbia firm preparing former quarry for mixed-use redevelopment |
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| Linda
Strowbridge MARCH 23, 2007 |
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Crews are about one-third of the
way through a reclamation process that will ready Delight Quarry
to become the site of a mixed residential-commercial
development. Geologists, soil engineers and earth-moving crews began reshaping the 125-acre quarry off Nicodemus Road six months ago and expect to complete their work in a year, said Steven Koren, founder and president of Columbia-based Koren Development Co. Koren Development is working with the quarry's owner, Florida Rock, on redeveloping the Reisterstown site. Quarrying operations at Delight have ceased, Koren said. Converting the quarry into a landscape of safe slopes "is a fairly long process and we anticipate setbacks," he said. "When you build a building, you go vertical and you work with materials that have defined shapes. When you work beneath the surface of the earth, as we do, with soils and sand and stone, conditions can vary every 100 feet." Koren said he doesn't anticipate any environmental problems with the reclamation process, part of which will occur beside Red Run stream. "Quarrying is a pretty clean operation. You take stone. You dig it out, blast it out, crush it up and move it. It's all done with force, which doesn't introduce any chemicals into the environment," so crews don't expect to unearth any contaminants during the reclamation, he said. Koren said his company likely won't begin drawing up development plans for Delight Quarry until early next year. "But if you look at what we're doing with Greenspring Quarry, that's the type of thing we're going to do here." Koren's company is developing
the 363-acre Quarry Lake development off Greenspring Avenue.
When it is finished, Quarry Lake will include 600 luxury
condominiums and single-family homes, 225,000 square feet of
commercial space and a 42-acre lake. |
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