The Mine Safety and Health Administration records 173 people at the Evansville Plant, which burns cement 3.5 miles off — more than any other site within fifteen miles of this borough on that record, by a wide margin.
A slate quarry works 3.4 miles off at Shoemakersville with 2 people on it, and a clay and shale operation 3.6 miles away.
So limestone, cement, slate and clay all load within four miles of each other, and they are four quite different cargoes. Slate travels as sheet and flag, cement in pneumatic tankers, clay wet and sticky in whatever will carry it, and crushed limestone as ordinary dump work.
Four operators hold most of this belt, and none of them is national
They are Pennsylvania and mid-Atlantic firms, and two of them carry lime in the name or the history. That matters for equipment: a regional holder buys, moves and retires trucks on its own cycle rather than on a corporate schedule set somewhere else.
The rest of the ring is varied. Two yards sit 5.8 miles off at Reading, a flour mill 6.6 miles away at Fleetwood, the Kutztown Quarry 12.6 miles out, the Dyer Quarry works traprock 13.0 miles away at Birdsboro with 28 people, an anthracite preparation plant sits 13.0 miles off and the Rolling Rock Pit works dimension stone 14.5 miles away with 38.
Tandem and tri-axle dumps, pneumatic tankers off the cement, flatbeds and day cabs, rollbacks, box trucks, service bodies and pickups.
A truck that ran limestone and later carried cement out of the Evansville Plant is an ordinary history here, and between that plant 3.5 miles off and the Dyer Quarry 13.0 miles away the work is short and heavy. It shows in springs and brakes rather than on the clock.
- Ordinary between the Evansville Plant and the Kutztown Quarry.
The rest is what it is anywhere — retirements, estates, a contract that ended, or a truck standing between Shoemakersville 3.4 miles off and the Rolling Rock Pit 14.5 miles away that nobody has needed since.