Miller County
Three people, and a restricted crossing nine tenths of a mile out
MSHA records 3 employees at IROCK #5, under Magruder Limestone Co, 1.13 miles from the middle of town.
Four of the restricted nine are county-maintained and the nearest is 0.89 miles away. The lowest rating among them is 9.9 tonnes — under the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump — so no commercial vehicle crosses that one at all, loaded or empty. The lowest that does admit one is rated 15.3 tonnes, about 16.9 US tons, which leaves roughly 4.3 tonnes of stone over that tare against the twenty-five a legal 80,000 lb truck carries.
A three-man pit with a crossing like that under a mile from it is not running a routing problem now and then. It is running one every day it loads.
And the whole of this country reads the same way
That is not a fact about one pit. This is the country between the Missouri’s valley and the Lake of the Ozarks, where the Osage and the Gasconade cut deep into the Ozark rim and the Bagnell Dam has held the Osage back since 1931.
The road networks here are thin and the restriction rates are high. Camden 17.9 per cent, Miller 21.9, Morgan 22.0, Hickory 28.6, Osage 29.2 and Maries 33.3 per cent of county-maintained structures failing item 70 — against 12.7 per cent across Missouri’s counties, and against 1.0 per cent in Cole County immediately beside them.
Miller County’s own share of that is 14 of the 64 structures it maintains. The valleys need many small bridges, and many small bridges on a rural county’s budget is how a rate like that is arrived at.
The practical reading for a truck is that the route matters more here than the load does. Cole County sits next door at a fortieth of the rate, so this is a local condition rather than a Missouri one, and it does not follow a truck out of the district.
Around the pit, and across Miller County and Morgan County, the lake country turns over a steady amount of it.
- Most trucks out of this country have. The nearest restricted crossing to this pit is 0.89 miles out and the lowest rating in that group is under the tare of an empty tandem, so going round is the normal case rather than the exception here. It is not a mark against the truck.
- It ran part loaded most of the time.Say so, but it is not a problem. A cap of 15.3 tonnes admits about 4.3 tonnes of stone over an empty tandem’s tare, so part loaded is what these roads ask for. It tends to mean fewer hard miles rather than more.