Aggregates Manager Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/777939
AGGREGATES MANAGER / February 2017 17 the Lake the Lake From its location on Lake Erie, Marblehead Quarry has been supplying aggregate for cities along the great lake since 1891. The processing plant at LafargeHolcim's Marblehead Quarry in Ohio, located on the shore of Lake Erie. When the company designed and built the yard, several things were taken into consideration. They fi nished out the roads, one coming into the quarry leading to the new truck loading yard and one going out from the scale and scalehouse. Now, the truckers come in on one side of the scale- house, receive their loads from loaders in the new yard, and circle around to the scale to get weighed, pick up a ticket, and exit on the other side of the scalehouse. Haul trucks fi ll the stockpiles in the yard from the backside, so they remain sepa- rated from the customer trucks, thereby minimizing any traffi c problems. The result is a smooth circular fl ow of truck traffi c in and out of the facility. "Our trucks haul from our fi nished piles in the plant, so it added a little bit of cost, but we recoup that in the increase in tonnage hauled by OTR trucks," Grashel explains. "It's very cyclical. We may see a thousand tons a day go out on customer trucks, but the local projects are hit or miss." Operations "The facility and the site have a tendency to be challenging," Grashel says. "We have large cap rocks and oversized that we have to deal with, so we separate them out at the face and set the large stuff aside for secondary breakage. A third-par- ty contractor manages all the larger stones and rip rap production sales for us." The contractor stages the oversized rock in piles according to size, and then hauls them across the road in the Village of Marblehead to the dock area where a crane is used to set them on barges. From there the rock is shipped to Cleveland and Lorain, primarily for shoreline protection, most of which is done by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The quarry normally runs two haul trucks in the pit that are fed by two 992 loaders. Tandem loading of haul trucks is most effi cient in the pit, except when working in tight corners. The primary crusher is an impactor, which Grashel says is unique for a quarry the size of Marble- head, as most high-production quarries