Jefferson County
This is the sand plant the rest of the state gets compared against
The industrial-sand operation here is run by Covia Solutions and records 10 employees. It matters out of proportion to that number, because it is the frac-sand-associated operator that makes the abrasion question a live one across eastern Missouri.
The reasoning is simple enough. Missouri holds five cement plants and six industrial-sand operations, and this is one of them. So a pneumatic tanker sold anywhere in this half of the state could have carried cement or it could have carried sand, and the two are not the same duty: proppant is selected for hardness and crush resistance, and it goes through a tank, the blower, the product lines and the aeration pads faster than cement does.
Which one a given tank carried is not in any record. It is in the seller’s head, and it is worth telling us. The crushed-stone operation here records 8 employees and sits 0.67 miles from the middle of town.
And the posted count here overstates the roads several times over
Those trucks run one of the easier corridors in the state, though the signs do not say so.
Only the second number is a restriction on this trade, and the gap between the two is the widest kind found anywhere in Missouri. The median of the posted group here is 49.5 metric tonnes, well above the 36.3 a fully legal 80,000 lb truck weighs — so a load crosses the typical posted structure whole.
That overstatement is concentrated rather than general, and this county is the clearest case of it. Around here the posted group runs about 50 tonnes and only a fifth of it also fails on load; down in Cape Girardeau and St Francois the same group runs 19 to 25 tonnes and three quarters to all of it fails. So there is no statewide correction that would be right in both places, and none is applied.
The three that matter are not close. Two are county-maintained, the nearest is 7.99 miles out, and the lowest that still admits a loaded commercial vehicle is rated about 14.9 US tons. Jefferson County restricts 4 of 181 — 2.2 per cent against a statewide county rate of 12.7.
Pneumatic tankers off the sand and the cement. Around the Covia Solutions plant, and across Jefferson County, this corridor turns over a steady amount of it.
- My tanker hauled sand rather than cement.Then it has worked harder, and this is the town where that question starts. Sand is selected for hardness and goes through the tank, blower, lines and pads faster than cement does. We would like the history; it does not change whether we buy it.
- There are posted signs everywhere round here.Twenty-one crossings within ten miles carry a posting and three are actually rated below legal loads. It is the second number that decides a route.