Oregon County
A two-man quarry in one of the tightest road networks in the state
The quarry here reports two employees to the Mine Safety and Health Administration and sits 0.47 miles from the middle of town.
The roads around it are another matter. Oregon County restricts 8 of 24 county-maintained structures — 33.3 per cent, seventh of the 109 Missouri counties that maintain at least twenty.
Wayne County restricts 30 of 69, second of the 109. Reynolds is third, Douglas sixth, this county seventh and Bollinger tenth. The reason is drainage rather than neglect: deeply dissected uplands need a lot of small bridges, and a lot of small bridges on a small county budget is what ends up posted.
So the machine here was routed rather than simply loaded
That kind of network changes the job before the truck is even loaded. Within ten miles there are 30 structures, three carrying a posting and three rated below legal loads — none county-maintained, the nearest 7.80 miles out. The lowest that still admits a loaded commercial vehicle is rated about 18.8 US tons, which admits roughly 6.1 tonnes of stone over the tare of an empty tandem dump.
For a truck the consequence is that a load out here was routed rather than simply loaded, and the wear falls on running gear and brakes rather than on the engine. That is worth saying to whoever buys it next, and it is the sort of thing an odometer does not show.
The operator matters more than the site here, too. Indian Creek Materials runs operations across the southern Missouri Ozarks — at Zalma, Hunter, Willow Springs, West Plains, Houston, Doniphan and here, according to the Mine Safety and Health Administration. A company that size moves machines between its own sites as the work moves, and those counties are not alike: one of them restricts a third of what it maintains and another owns five bridges in total. So one of their machines might carry the wear of the second-most restricted corner of the state or of a county with almost no county network at all.
Around the Indian Creek workings, and across Oregon County, this county turns over a steady amount of it.
- My machine moved around between the company’s sites.Very common with the operators around here, and worth telling us. Some of those counties restrict a third of their bridges and others have almost no county network at all, so where it actually ran says more than who owned it.
The quarry here sits 0.47 miles from the middle of town, and Oregon County usually has one parked somewhere.