Thea Alvin spends every possible moment outdoors in the summer.
Weather permitting, the Morristown resident walks her dogs, shears her Angora goats, rides her mountain bike and builds elaborate award-winning sculptures in her yard.
Now she and others in the area are worried that they’ll be forced indoors to avoid inhaling dangerous dust. The reason: A quarry that would generate silica dust has been proposed nearby — and would operate for a decade.
“That’s 10 years of me being unable to go outside every summer,” said Alvin, a 60-year-old artist who lives just a few hundred yards from the quarry site. Speaking of an elderly friend, she said, “That’s 10 years of my neighbor, in the last years of her life, not being able to safely breathe the air.”
A yearslong battle over plans for an industrial park and quarry on farmland across Route 100 from the Morrisville-Stowe State Airport has anxious residents holding their breath for a permit decision due any day.
The quarry is part of local businessman Garret Hirchak’s plan to build a sprawling campus of 26 industrial buildings on what is now 89 acres of cornfields and forest. Local zoning officials signed off on the project in 2023 over the objections of many residents.
Now a three-member state Act 250 land-use review panel must weigh the project’s environmental impacts as it decides whether to issue a permit for the proposed industrial park. One pending question is whether the quarry will produce dangerous levels of silica dust, a known health hazard. Monday was the deadline for each side to make its case, and a ruling is expected soon.
“The decision they are about to make is vital and will set the stage for the next steps for everybody,” Alvin said.
The stakes are high. Hirchak’s company, Sunrise Development, proposes to build what would be one of the biggest industrial parks in Vermont and the largest project in Morristown in recent memory.
Hirchak and his backers have pitched the project as important for central Vermont’s economic future. They argue that it would help businesses grow and would attract new firms to the state. The park would create an estimated 1,800-plus jobs, according to the developer.
“This development is important for this Town and region,” Hirchak told Seven Days in an email.
Hirchak is the CEO of Morrisville’s Manufacturing Solutions, Inc., one of the largest employers in Lamoille County. MSI is a contract manufacturer specializing in metal fabrication. It builds everything from rowing machines to electrical components to firearms.
Hirchak and his wife, Beth Salvas, MSI’s president, acquired 437 acres west of the airport in 2021. The industrial park would be located on an 89-acre section just across the road from the airport entrance.
A tree-covered knoll, which is a 12-acre deposit of quartz, rises 55 feet in the middle of that property. Development plans call for removing it, which would necessitate a temporary quarry on the site.
Blasting out the hill would make it easier to construct the park’s buildings and infrastructure. About 49,000 tons of rock per year would be removed over the course of a decade. Some of the gravel and crushed stone would be used for the project’s roads and parking lots, while the rest would be trucked away and sold. The estimated cost of that development work, not including construction of the buildings, is around $6 million, according to Hirchak. Full build-out would likely cost more than $100 million, he estimated.
Most of the residents’ opposition, especially since last summer, has focused on the quarry. That’s when tests of the bedrock ordered by the Act 250 commission found that it is nearly pure quartz.
“That was a game changer,” Alvin, a stonemason, said.
The finding amplified fears that the quarry would create hazardous dust. When quartz is pulverized, crystalline silica dust is created. When inhaled, silica can lead to dangerous diseases including silicosis, or scarring of the lung, which can be deadly. It can also increase the risk of lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and kidney ailments, according to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
The greatest health risks, which have been known for nearly 100 years, are to construction and quarry workers with heavy exposure to the dust. Operations are encouraged to require respirators for workers and to use water and vacuum equipment to control dust.
Silica dust is listed as a hazardous air contaminant in Vermont and is strictly regulated. The quarry would need an air quality permit from the Agency of Natural Resources. The developer has proposed a detailed plan to limit the spread of any dust. The plan involves wetting the rock during blasting, crushing and sorting; sweeping it off roads; and placing air monitors around the site.
But residents remain fearful.
Nancy Dunavan, 66, moved to Vermont from Colorado four years ago in part because of the promise of clean air. She’s now a member of the Morristown Conservation Commission, which opposes the quarry.
She lives about three miles from the site and worries less for herself and her husband than for people who live closer.
Once it’s in the air, you just don’t know where those particles will be going.
Nancy Dunavan
“Once it’s in the air, you just don’t know where those particles will be going,” Dunavan said. “If you’re out there working and you breathe at the wrong time, it’s going to be in your lungs.”
Even the town has changed its tune in the wake of the test results on the rock.
In 2023, the Morristown Development Review Board approved the plan despite opposition from at least 150 people at a public hearing and another 2,500 who signed a petition, Alvin said.
“They didn’t hear a single thing we said,” Alvin said. “Their decision was made before we walked in.”
According to Alvin, the board reasoned that the temporary nature of the proposed operation meant a prohibition on quarries in that area of town did not apply.
But just two months after learning of the results of tests at the quarry site, a town attorney, David Rugh, sent a letter to the Act 250 district commission saying the town was now “adamantly opposed” to “blasting and rock removal activities” on the property.
“The Town has significant concerns regarding the impacts to the public’s health, safety and welfare from the Project’s silica emissions, especially if the mitigation measures proposed are not as successful as anticipated,” Rugh wrote.
Considering the prevailing winds, much of the town and all of Morrisville village “sit in the cross-hairs of the emissions from the Project’s earth extraction activities,” Rugh wrote. The selectboard proposed a “scaled-down” version of the project that would leave the knoll as is, eliminate the quarry and drop plans for three buildings proposed for the knoll site, Rugh wrote.
Town manager Brent Raymond stressed that the letter was not an about-face on the overall project but was a suggestion based on the new information.
“The intent of the letter was to let the state know that they expect the state to fully analyze any potential risk to the community that could result from silica,” Raymond said.
On Monday evening, facing a room full of residents opposed to the quarry, Morristown Selectboard chair Donald McDowell was blunt.
“We are opposed to this project,” he said to applause.
Hirchak acknowledged in an email that silica inhalation “is a serious matter” and said “people working in close proximity” to the dust need to take proper precautions. He added that using the quarried rock on-site would save money compared to bringing material in. Revamping the plan at this point would require onerous and costly additional study and re-permitting that still might not satisfy some opponents, Hirchak said.
Hirchak’s attorney, James Mahoney, pointedly noted in a letter to the town in December that the selectboard expressed concern about his client’s proposed quarry but not for a nearby gravel pit that extracts triple the amount of material.
His client is “at a loss as to how the Selectboard’s health and safety concern in this regard seems to stop at the MSI Airport Industrial Park property boundary.”
The intense focus on the risk of silica dust is largely due to Alvin, who has emerged as a leader of the opposition. She said she demanded the tests of the rock because from her home she can see the remains of an abandoned asbestos mine on Belvidere Mountain in Eden, a defunct operation that is now a Superfund site about 12 miles north of Morristown. Knowing that geologic formations typically run north-south in Vermont, Alvin worried that the same hazardous mineral might be present at the quarry site.
She has also used her skills as an artist to build multiple 3D models of the site to help people understand just how radically it would be transformed.
“This is a really big change from a cornfield,” she said.
In her studio last week, Alvin showed Seven Days three detailed topographical models she uses to illustrate her objections to the industrial park, which go well beyond just quarry dust. She pointed out where two 35-foot-high water tanks supplying 28,000 gallons per day are planned for the ridge above the site. She wants them lowered. She highlighted wetlands on the property, which she worries will be destroyed by roads and buildings. She even constructed tiny cardboard structures to illustrate the size and placement of the buildings and their parking lots and used thin blue yarn to depict tributaries and ponds.
She and her neighbors also worry about how many cars and trucks will come and go from the site during and after construction, what kinds of businesses might set up shop there, and other unknowns, she said. She said she’s proud of the selectboard for writing a strong letter in opposition and now wants the Act 250 commissioners to follow suit.
“I’m hopeful that they will see quarrying silica in a residential area as a no-go,” she said. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Quarry Dustup | Morristown residents worry that a proposed project to mine quartz could spread dangerous silica dust”
This article appears in Love & Marriage Issue • 2026.
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