Residents face an 80 per cent increase in the number of lorries carting material to and from a rural quarry along local roads on weekdays.
Consultation is underway on an application by Lafarge Tarmac to increase the number of lorry trips to its sand and gravel quarry in Tyttenhanger, south of Coursers Road in Colney Heath.
Currently permitted to have 210 vehicle movements on each weekday, Lafarge wants an additional 170 trips a day from Monday to Friday - a total of 380 daily.
The building material firm is also seeking approval to have an extra 54 lorry trips on a Saturday – up from 106 – on a permanent basis.
With that equating to an additional 904 lorry trips on local roads per week, county councillor for The Colneys Dreda Gordon warned that residents would be “very angry” about the application for a variation to a condition.
She said: “I think people will be up in arms when they hear about it because there has been a lot of work done on Coursers Road.
“Colney Heath parish council is very concerned about it. Coursers Road is a link road between London Colney and Colney Heath and it’s very much used by cyclists and motorists. And when there are tailbacks from the Bell roundabout, in addition to there being more lorries, this will cause chaos.”
Extraction, infilling and processing takes place at the site between 7am and 6pm Mondays to Fridays and 7am to 12.30pm on Saturdays.
Lafarge Tarmac obtained its first planning consent south of Coursers Road in 1997, to bring in waste material.
The quarry is located between the A414 and the M25, near junction 22.
In 2011, Lafarge obtained permission for the extraction of sand and gravel from an extension to the Tyttenhanger quarry, with progressive restoration of excavated land using inert fill material.
It serves five main catchment areas within 20km of the Coursers Road extension from which material is brought, including sites in Enfield, Barnet, St Albans, Hatfield, Epping, Hackney and Walthamstow.
In its planning statement to Herts county council, Lafarge said it wanted to ensure its infilling and restoration operations remained on schedule, by having 16 additional hourly lorry movements Monday to Friday boosted by a further eight per hour on a Saturday.
Consultation on the scheme ends on July 21, with the council expecting to make a decision by September 16.
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