Fifteen people between them, four miles out
Two crushed-stone operations work near this town and neither is big. The federal mine regulator records eight employees at the Clinton Quarry, 4.08 miles from the middle of town, and seven at the Lopke Quarries plant, 4.03 miles out.
Fifteen people between two gates, four miles from the same place. That is a handful of tandems working a short radius rather than a fleet, and the two of them share almost everything about the roads they use.
Including, it turns out, the one crossing that decides how much either of them can put on a truck.
The bridge that caps both of them belongs to the Forest Service
Both gates take their ceiling from the same structure, and it is not maintained by anyone you would expect. The bridge over S Fork Duncan Creek — 5.97 miles from one quarry and 5.91 from the other — carries maintenance code 64, the US Forest Service, in the Sumter National Forest.
It is rated 13.0 metric tonnes, about 14.3 US tons. Inside ten miles the file records 76 structures with six posted for load and nine coded below legal loads, five of them the state’s and three the county’s; the lowest rating in that set is 5.2 tonnes, which no commercial vehicle crosses at all, and the nearest restriction is 2.72 miles from one gate.
The irony in the statute
Timber gets the bigger allowance on the same forest roads
That crossing is worth one more sentence, because of what the law does with it. S.C. Code § 56-5-4140 gives unprocessed forest products a fifteen per cent enforcement tolerance off the interstate, against the general ten in § 56-5-4160.
So the trade that draws the larger allowance is running the same national forest roads that these two stone operations haul over, and stone draws nothing extra. That is not a complaint and it is not a loophole — it is simply the shape of the section, and it is the kind of thing worth knowing before anyone argues about a ticket.
It also tells you what the trucks around here look like. Timber rigs and stone tandems on the same roads, under two different numbers.
S.C.
Dump trucks and aggregate haulers, log trucks and timber rigs, day cabs and road tractors, flatbeds and rollbacks, service bodies, box trucks and straight trucks, and the pickups and work trucks that go with a crew.
The Lopke Quarries gate 4.03 miles out, the Clinton Quarry gate 4.08 miles out, and the forest roads that carry both of them, are where most of it turns up.
- Woods work is short hauls on ground that was never a road, so the odometer understates what a truck like that has done.
Around the Lopke Quarries gate, and out over the Duncan Creek crossing towards the rest of Laurens County, the same trucks come up for sale for the same reasons.