In the 14 years Joanne Maloney has lived in the area, she's never heard anything like it.
In the early afternoon of Sept. 8, she heard an exceptionally loud explosion from across the Nechako River.
"My house shook, I was scared, my dogs ran," said the resident of Evergreen Mobile Home Park on the north side of the river.
It turned out the noise came from a blasting operation at a gravel quarry on Sandberg Road, owned by PG Rock and Gravel Ltd.
The event caused a stir on social media, operations manager Todd Carlton acknowledged. In the aftermath, the company's secretary took to the Hart Community Facebook page to apologize and explain what had happened.
Carlton attributed the louder-than-usual explosion to a bout of "shallow blasting" to make an area more accessible.
"The holes weren't very deep...so the sound wasn't absorbed by the mass of rock," Carlton said.
He said activity at the site, which employs eight people, has been more frequent since it came under new ownership roughly four years ago and noted the plan for the operation includes keeping a certain amount of berm in place to hide the site and reduce the sound from the explosions.
The above-ground blasting will continue for the next year and a bit due to the nature of the rock face but then give way to quieter below-surface blasting within two years, Carlton said.
"And over the next five years, it's going to get reduced again because we're going to be still below surface and there's going to be a seven-metre berm around the thing so you can't even see it or hear it. You might see a puff of dust, and that'll be it," Carlton said.
However, he also warned that there could be days with the work is exceptionally loud, such as when the city is under a high-pressure weather system which tends to carry sound waves further.
"We've been trying to actually reduce the size of the blasts over time to keep that sort of thing at bay, but sometimes it's not feasible to do tiny blasts," Carlton said.
For the time being, Carlton said notices will be posted on the Hart Community Facebook page, but they will subside as the work progresses, partly out of concern that the notices could prompt some to make the journey out to the site to see the blast and create a safety problem in the process.
Giving the public advanced notice is actually above and beyond what the operation is required to do under its permit.
It need go no further than give 48-hours advanced notice to the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Low Carbon Innovation. Prince George RCMP are also notified and as a courtesy, so are the operation's immediate neighbours, Carlton said.
"There is no regulatory requirement for public notification," ministry communications manager Glen Plummer confirmed in an email.
He said the ministry did not receive any complaints about the Sept. 8 blast.
The public may report any incidents or concerns about mines, including aggregate operations, by calling the ministry's complaint line at 833-978-9798 or emailing [email protected].
