Huntingdon County
Forty-two people, on a borough of a fifth of a square mile
The Mine Safety and Health Administration records 42 employees at the industrial sand plant near this borough. It lies 1.16 miles from the Census centre, and the borough itself covers under a fifth of a square mile.
The operator of record is the Silica Company, the site is carried at surface under MSHA identifier 3603122, and the commodity is industrial sand.
The two markets make different freight. Glass sand goes to a plant on a contract lane — steady, repeated, a known destination. Oilfield sand goes wherever the work is, in bulk, at short notice. A truck bought for one is not the truck you would buy for the other, and the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s record does not say which this is.
A rule that bites harder here than at a stone quarry
Beyond the market question there is a regulatory one that does have an answer. The federal limit for respirable crystalline silica is 50 micrograms per cubic metre with an action level of half that, and the compliance date for metal and nonmetal operations has passed.
That rule reaches its sharpest application at a site like this one, because the commodity is substantially silica by design rather than a rock that happens to contain some.
The same operation falls under the federal training part covering sand, gravel and surface stone, which requires site-specific hazard awareness training for over-the-road delivery drivers before work at each site. Around here the rest is thin: a yard 7.6 miles off, the Orbisonia Quarry 13.2 miles away with 5 people, and two limestone operations both 15.7 miles out.
Pneumatic tankers off the sand, dumps, flatbeds and day cabs, rollbacks, box trucks, service bodies and pickups.
Dry bulk is hard on a blower, a compressor and the tank itself, and none of that shows on an odometer. Between the yard 7.6 miles off and the Orbisonia Quarry 13.2 miles away the lanes are long enough that the mileage is honest, so both ends of the truck deserve looking at.
- On sand work out of this borough they are most of what there is.
- Will you come out to a borough this small?
The rest is retirements and estates, and the truck parked between here and the Orbisonia Quarry 13.2 miles away that nobody has needed since.