As a boulder, about 40 feet long and 20 feet wide, hangs precariously over East Kingston, contractors plan to remove the giant rock before it removes itself.

"It concerns everybody here in East Kingston," neighbor Ginger Ferrazzano said, while standing in the shadow of the mountain on the west side of Main Street.

"It could come down anytime," said Chuck Hapeman, who lives on the east side of Main Street, directly in the path of the rock if it were to tumble down the mountain and across the street. "Who knows when Mother Nature is going to do it?"

Two previous rock slides on July 25 and August 9 left the boulder hanging without any support.

The mountain is collapsing. Town officials told Spectrum News on Tuesday that the height of the mountain decreased by two to three feet since the previous slides.

Before removing the rock, contractors must clear out trees and build a 300-foot-long wall at the base of the mountain.

Ulster Town Supervisor James Quigley declared a state of emergency in the area on September 9, allowing contractors to bypass certain town rules to get the wall built by early October. Quigley said building the wall must be done before any attempts to move the boulder, so that homes and a local church are protected if workers lose control of the rock.

"The worst thing that could happen is letting that 40-foot piece of rock loose and fall down," Quigley explained in an interview at the scene. "If there's nothing at the base to stop it, it could continue right across the street into the church."

Since Albany-based paving materials supplier Callanan Industries owns the land, the company is paying for the tree removal, wall construction, studies on the land, and removal of the rock.

The company has also suspended all nearby blasting, though Quigley is not blaming Callanan for the slides.

Quigley said a series of mining tunnels and rooms left over from a late-1800s cement mining operation left the mountain partially hollow and the rocks above became too heavy for the cielings.

"[This is] evidence that these mines do collapse from time to time," Quigley said, "and that there are consequences of the activities that took place in the 1800s in the economy and our community that made us prosperous that we're now paying a price for."

Quigley has been consulting universities, libraries, and local historical associations to find out where other old cement mines might be located in the town. He said that since this type of mining happened before government monitoring and regulations, there is no record of cement mines in the town.