Company Spotlight - Kilmog Quarry

Driving up and down roads in the South Island? There’s a pretty good chance the rock and gravel you’re on top of came from one of HWR’s companies – Kilmog Quarries.

A company under SouthRoads in our Quarrying division, Kilmog Quarries consists of two sites (Kilmog and Smylers Peak) just north of Dunedin. These two quarries provide aggregate and rock for both commercial and private clients. This includes AP products, conforming roading aggregates, gabion rock, shotrock/ripped rock and clean fill tipping.

Quarry Manager Geoff Scurr has been in the quarrying business for more than 20 years and oversees a small team of workers who undertake various roles across the two sites.

As far as the team can find out, Kilmog Quarry was started in 1870, he says.

“I reckon it’s got at least that amount [152 years] left in it. If you go right out to the boundaries and keep going down, there’s plenty of life left,” he says.

In their simplest form, these quarries produce rock. A lot of rock. A recent controlled explosion at the Smylers Peak Quarry released around 40,000 tonnes of rock, which will have its overburden stripped, be crushed and screened before it’s made into a myriad of products over the next 12 months.

Some of the bigger projects Kilmog is supplying to currently include a large forestry road, which is expected to go on for the next five years, as well as supplying to a railways project that required a large rock groyne to be built into a river, so a crane could be placed near it.

Rock from the quarries ends up in all sorts of places, especially in civil contracting and roading projects. As Geoff says, “we’ll supply gravel to anybody that wants it.”

Catch Geoff Scurr Quarry manager himself - WATCH HERE