Barry County
Ten miles on the map is not ten miles on the road
Purdy Quarry records 7 employees and lies 0.97 miles from the middle of Purdy. The pit is effectively in the village.
The country round it is the Ozark Plateau, where flat-lying limestone is cut by deep narrow valleys and, since the 1910s, flooded by the White River reservoirs. Table Rock, Bull Shoals and Taneycomo did not just add water to the map; they cut the routes across it.
Two things follow and they pull against each other. The plateau surface itself has little relief and few streams worth bridging, so road networks here are thin — 43 structures within ten miles at the Table Rock quarry against 607 at Kansas City. But an arm of a reservoir is a barrier with a crossing every several miles, so a market that looks circular on a map is in practice divided into lobes.
That is why we treat the ten-mile figure below as a measure of what is near rather than of what is reachable. The gap between those two is wider in this corner of the state than anywhere else in it.
So the circle round this pit, with that caveat attached
With that said, the circle here is not one of the thin ones. The nearest of those ten is 1.19 miles out.
Across Barry County 10 of 93 county-maintained structures fail the load test, a little under the Missouri county-maintained rate. On the county numbers this is ordinary ground.
The lowest operating rating among the restricted crossings is 3.6 metric tonnes, well under the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump, so nothing commercial crosses that one loaded or empty. The lowest that does admit a commercial vehicle is 15.3 tonnes, about 16.9 US tons, leaving roughly 4.3 tonnes of stone over the tare against the twenty-five a legal 80,000 lb truck carries.
Put the two halves together and you get the local pattern: not many restricted crossings, but the ones there are sit on routes that a lake has already narrowed. A truck out of here has done more miles than the map suggests it needed to, and that is worth saying rather than explaining away.
Poultry and feed trucks, farm trucks and grain trucks off the plateau.
- The mileage looks high for the work it did.Around the lakes that is usual. An arm of a reservoir is a barrier with a crossing every several miles, so a short haul on the map is a long one on the road.
- It only ever worked one pit.A single-site operation runs what it has, so the machine has usually had one duty for a long stretch rather than several duties briefly.