Five people, and a restricted group where nothing is a wall
MSHA records 5 employees at the S-S-S Quarry, 1.57 miles from the middle of town.
The useful number is the lowest one. At 16.2 tonnes the lowest rating in the restricted group is also the lowest that admits a commercial vehicle — which means every one of the five clears the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump. Nothing inside ten miles of this pit is closed to a truck outright.
What they do instead is take a slice off the load. A cap of 16.2 tonnes, about 17.9 US tons, admits roughly 5.2 tonnes of stone over that tare, against the twenty-five a legal 80,000 lb truck carries. That is a route decision, not a dead end.
And the county figure says the same thing from further back
That reading holds when you widen it out. Across Pike County as a whole, 17 of the 123 structures the county maintains fail item 70 — 13.8%, against 12.7% across Missouri’s counties.
A point above the state average and a ten-mile circle where nothing is closed are not in conflict. They are the same picture at two scales: a fair number of rated crossings, none of them severe.
The median operating rating of the posted group here is 16.2 tonnes as well, which no loaded stone truck approaches — so the signs and the ratings inside this circle are pointing at the same small handful of structures rather than at two separate problems.
For a truck that has worked out of this town the practical consequence is fewer hard detours than the lake counties further south impose, and more part-loaded running than a flat county would ask for.
Around the quarry, and across Pike County and Ralls County, the river country turns over a steady amount of it.
- A cap of 16.2 tonnes admits about 5.2 tonnes of stone over an empty tandem’s tare, so part loaded is normal here rather than a sign of anything wrong.