Thar she blows!

By

News

March 18, 2011 - 12:00 AM

A heap of rock and dust blew from along the south rim of Allen County’s quarry at high noon Thursday.
In less time than a snap of the fingers, 157 charges buried 24 feet deep were discharged, pulverizing a 100-foot limestone shelf into 25,000 tons of moderate-sized boulders. From there the county’s crusher will make them into road rock of several dimensions.
Danny Hurt of Humboldt was a happy man. That pile of rubble made for a successful day.
As an employee of Buckley Powder Co., Aurora, Mo., it was his job to set the charges, a sticky slurry of ammonia nitrate. With the mixture tamped into the six-inch holes, Hurt inserted the fuses. Ignition of each charge happened within thousandths of a second.
So precise was Hurt’s work that a pond at the base of the ledge was hardly disturbed.
A few minutes before the blast, county workers and vehicles were ordered from the quarry, even those seemingly well beyond any danger. A seismograph was placed near Diebolt Lumber and Supply, half a mile away, to measure any reverberations.
For Hurt and his fellow workers, safety is the overriding concern.
Eula Hutton, supervisor of quarry and landfill operations, said in such situations, “You can’t be too careful.”
The county did the blasting itself until a few years ago when safety concerns and escalating insurance costs made hiring a contractor a better investment.

THURSDAY was the fourth time this year the Buckley crew has serviced the quarry. Each blasting session yields about 25,000 tons, Hutton said.
“That should get us through the year,” Hutton added.
In most years Allen County crushes about 200,000 tons of rock.
“We have 20,000 tons of crushed rock in storage and we had quite a bit of raw rock broken out already,” said Bill King, director of Public Works, noting mechanical problems had curtailed crushing over the last several weeks.
“The crusher’s ready to go now,” he said.
That’s important this time of year. Spring and early summer rains in southeast Kansas often come hard and fast, with scouring of loose-rock roads near any stream or gully.
“We can make (crushed) rock pretty fast and we can use it up pretty fast, too,” King said.
With the newly pulverized limestone slumped along the south edge of the quarry, Hutton is confident demand can be met.
If more raw material is needed, she said Buckley would be summoned again. The company spends much of its time in the area, breaking out limestone for Monarch Cement Co. in Humboldt, Bourbon and Neosho counties and Midwest Minerals.
In a typical year, “we probably blast 3 or 4 million tons, maybe more than that,” Hurt said.

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