A hearse arrived at midday and family members followed it out of sight towards the quarry.
Colin Campbell, a 73-year-old who grew up in a house on the quarry property, recalls a large slip at the site as a boy, on the opposite side to yesterday's suspected fatal rockfall.
"It's always been a dangerous game to be in," he said.
Mr Campbell's father Tom Campbell was the quarry manager in the 1950s when explosives were used to blast limestone from the rock face.
At 15, Mr Campbell left school to drive the quarry's trucks.
He spent 27 years working there, including many years as manager himself, succeeding his father.
The fear of slips, or rockfalls, was ever-present.
On one occasion, Mr Campbell was operating a bulldozer, without a protective cab, when a landslip buried him almost up to his waist.
"I managed to free my legs and get myself out. I was just lucky the rest of it didn't come down on top of me," he said.
That incident was in the same area that buried Mr Taylor, Mr Campbell said.
There was another slip "about 10-12 years ago" that occurred at night, said Mr Campbell who lives in nearby Waikari, just a few kilometres away.
"If that happened in the day and somebody was working under it at the time, it would've for them too."
Last week, Mr Campbell visited the quarry and was given a look around "for old time's sake" by Mr Taylor, and his father, George.
Mr Campbell visited the spot almost exactly where the slip happened, and even at the time, he thought the overhanging rock face "didn't look all that secure to me".
It was a narrow cutting, with two side walls, he said.
The left hand side was sandstone, the right limestone, with parting seams running through them, he said.
Moisture could have got in the seams, frozen, expanded, and caused movement, Mr Campbell believes.
The experienced quarry worker today lamented the relaxing of the industry's regulations.
As quarry manager in the past, he needed to be licensed and to carry out twice weekly site safety checks.
"But the government did away with all that. They've got slack on the rules and it's basically become self-governed. It's not good enough," Mr Campbell said.
Mr Taylor bought the quarry lease, outbuildings, and lime crusher about 15 years ago.
A booming market was providing crushed lime for dairy farm lanes, Mr Campbell said.
Hurunui District Council, which owns the quarry, originally bought it as a landfill site.
Mr Campbell said Mr Taylor was "a great fella to everybody".
"He'd help out anybody if he could. The whole family are bloody good people."
Mr Taylor's digger cab sustained a "catastrophic collapse", Mr Parnell said at a press conference at the entrance to the quarry this afternoon.
Officers have seen inside the crushed digger's cab, Mr Parnell said.
Around 1500 tonnes - even more than the 1000 tonnes estimated yesterday - came down in the slip, police say. Some rocks weighed around 15 tonnes.
"We envisage at this stage that we will continue through into the early evening and potentially beyond the hours of darkness," said Mr Parnell.
Heavy excavation equipment, including large diggers and bulldozers, as well as heavy haulage and recovery machinery, have been steadily flowing into the quarry today as police work to clear the rocks.
The safety of the site was still "precarious", Mr Parnell stressed, and was being monitored by seismic equipment.
Experts from the industry have been of a "huge advantage" to police in the operation, he said.
He was optimistic of recovering the body later today.
The Taylor family was "understandably distraught", he said, but it had been "advantageous" to have them on site today so they can see the "magnitude and scale" of the operation.
