Reynolds County
The two biggest mines on the trend are here
Two of the six Viburnum Trend mines sit at this town, and they are the two largest: Fletcher at 189 employees and Brushy Creek at 139. Between them that is 328 of the 663 people the whole district employs, according to the Mine Safety and Health Administration — about half the workforce, in one small town’s catchment.
Both are underground lead-zinc mines with mills attached, and both are operated by The Doe Run Company under Renco Group.
A machine that spent its life underground ran at steady temperature and out of the weather, which is a materially different history from one that worked the roads outside. It is the most useful single thing a seller can tell us about a mine machine.
And what leaves the mill weighs out before it fills up
That ore is what makes haulage here unlike the rest of the state. Lead concentrate is exceptionally dense, and it weighs out at a fraction of a trailer’s cubic capacity — so a loaded truck leaving one of these mills is at its legal limit with a box that still looks half empty.
It shows in the wear rather than in the odometer. A truck that reaches 80,000 lb without filling its body has spent its life loading heavy and low, and what tires is the frame, the suspension and the brakes rather than anything to do with volume. Nobody can read that off a spec sheet.
The roads out of here compound it. Reynolds County restricts 9 of 24 county-maintained structures — 37.5 per cent, third of the 109 Missouri counties that maintain at least twenty. Only Wayne County, at 30 of 69, is worse. This is the most route-constrained corner of the state, and the reason is drainage: deeply dissected uplands need a lot of small bridges, and a lot of small bridges on a small county budget is what gets posted.
So a load out of Bunker was routed before it was loaded, and the wear falls on running gear and brakes rather than on the engine.
Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the ore and the stone. Around the Brushy Creek mill, and across Reynolds County, this town turns over a steady amount of it.
Around the Doe Run workings at Fletcher, and across Reynolds County, there is usually one sitting.