Wayne County
The second most restricted county road network in Missouri
Wayne County restricts 30 of its 69 county-maintained structures — 43.5 per cent, second of the 109 Missouri counties that maintain at least twenty, behind only Cedar County at 44.8 per cent. The statewide county figure is 12.7 per cent.
Close in it is no better. Within ten miles of the plant here there are 77 structures, 22 carrying a posting and 19 rated below legal loads. Thirteen of those nineteen are the county’s own, and the nearest is 1.04 miles out — effectively at the gate.
Five of the ten most restricted county networks in Missouri are in this corner of the Ozarks.
And the plant here does not make aggregate at all
Those roads are worked by an operation with 64 employees whose product is not construction stone. The Gads Hill Plant makes roofing granules — coloured, sized, ceramic-coated chips bonded onto asphalt shingles — and its operator string carries CertainTeed.
It is the smaller of two such operations in Missouri; the other, at Annapolis in Iron County, employs 186. Between them that is 250 people in this state making a product most people have on their roof and have never heard of.
Three things follow for equipment and none is the usual one. Production runs to a factory schedule rather than a construction season, so utilisation is flat across the year. The output leaves largely by rail to a small number of shingle plants rather than by truck to many sites, so employment stops predicting road mileage. And the on-site fleet is weighted towards plant and yard work rather than highway haulage, which ages tyres, hoists and low-speed driveline ahead of engines.
That last point matters more here than at Annapolis, because the roads outside are so tight. A machine that mostly stayed in the yard avoided one of the two worst county networks in the state; one that ran the roads did not, and the difference between those two histories is large.
Around the Gads Hill works, and across Wayne County and Iron County, this corner turns over a steady amount of it.
- Are the roads out here really the worst in Missouri?By this measure, yes — this county restricts over forty per cent of what it maintains, second of 109. The nearest restricted crossing is about a mile from the plant.