Quarry and Aggregates Insurance

On most quarry sites the entire revenue passes through two or three machines, and that concentration is the dominant commercial risk.

A primary crusher out of action stops production. A conveyor fire takes out the belt, the structure and often the drive at once. A washplant failure stops a product line. In each case the physical repair is substantial and the lost production is larger, because a quarry cannot borrow a replacement primary crusher at short notice and lead times on major plant run to many months.

So three things need to be right together, and they are usually looked at separately. The sum insured on each major asset, including installation and the civils rather than the machine price. Machinery breakdown, because a mechanical failure is not an insured peril. And a business interruption indemnity period set against a realistic replace-and-recommission timeline, which on a primary plant is rarely twelve months.

Operators tend to worry about the fuel tank, and the claim that actually arrives is about silt.

A quarry moves a great deal of water: rainfall across disturbed ground, washplant process water, and dewatering from below the water table. All of it picks up fine material, and suspended solids leaving the site into a watercourse is a pollution incident even though nothing toxic was involved. It damages the receiving water, it is visible from a long way off, and it attracts the regulator quickly.

The insurance complication is that this builds up rather than happening in a moment, and gradual pollution is excluded on many wordings while sudden and accidental release is covered. So the likely incident is the one more likely to be excluded. Settlement lagoons, silt management, maintained interceptors and monitoring are the operational controls, and the pollution wording is worth reading in detail rather than assumed.

A quarry's liability exposure at the boundary is unlike most industrial sites, because the nuisance is continuous rather than accidental.

Dust on cars and washing, vibration from plant and haulage, noise from early shifts, and mud on the public road are complaints rather than claims to begin with. They become expensive when they turn into a planning enforcement matter, a nuisance action, or a condition being tightened in a way that restricts hours or output. The cost then is operational rather than a repair.

The planning permission is therefore part of the risk picture, and an insurer will want to know the conditions you work under: hours, output limits, haulage routes, restoration obligations and any bond. A site with a clean compliance history and documented monitoring presents very differently from one with a history of complaints, and that difference is larger than any premium negotiation.

Many operators now run mobile crushing and screening on other people's sites, and that is a different exposure from the quarry it was insured as.

The plant leaves your controlled environment and works on a construction site, a demolition site or a landfill, with their traffic management, their ground conditions and their people nearby. The plant itself is away from your security arrangements and often left overnight. And you are now a contractor on somebody else's site, with their permit regime and their contract terms, including indemnity clauses pointed at you.

A policy written around a fixed quarry may not follow the plant off site, or may do so with restrictions on security and operation. Declare the contract work and the proportion of turnover it represents, because it is a genuinely different risk rather than the same risk in a new postcode.

This is a site-underwritten risk rather than a trade code, and the submission matters more than the shopping around. We are an FCA regulated broker and will not tell you we are the best choice. These are the questions that decide it.