|
|
||
|
|||
Cement Goes In,
Cement Goes Out The St. Lawrence Cement plant in the Duluth-Superior harbor wouldn't exist without St. Lawrence Cement. Tons and tons and tons of St. Lawrence Cement.
We won't press him on the subject. Not when otherwise he is a veritable font of information. He recalls the 560 pipe piles, driven into the ground and filled with concrete, that were required to deal with the site's challenging subsoil conditions. He recalls the six-foot concrete slab (surely that calls for italics) that rests on top of the piles. He knows virtually every square inch of the plant and what makes it tick, from the ground on which it stands to the lofty little metal deck way, way up high on one of the 217-foot silos that |
Groups Meet to Discuss Port Capital Needs Midwest Energy Breaks Own Record Museum Welcomes 10 millionith Visitor Who Says Indiana Harbor Isn't Romantic An Anomaly Wrapped in an Enigma? Wheat: King of the Northern Plains |
||
| offers an absolutely stunning view
of the harbor, the city and its hillside backdrop. (The overall height, measuring from the
ground to top of the superstructure, or "penthouse," is 284 feet.) The plant, financed through an $18 million industrial revenue bond issued by the Seaway Port Authority of Duluth, was
completed in 1982 and earned the designing firm, Hoad Engineers, Inc., of Ypsilanti, Mich., a "Seven Wonders of Engineering" award from the Minnesota Society of Professional Engineers. The plant's official opening came at 0100 hours on 1 May 1982, when it began unloading the Soo River Trader. After 15 years with the company (St. Lawrence Cement is a member of the Holderbank Group, the world's largest producer of cement) and working with cement, Mr. Sobczak still beams with pride about his staff, and still carries a sense of wonder about the product he and his crew work with every day. He marvels that even gravity can't budge the cement down from its place in the silos if air isn't pumped into the towers to get the product moving. He remarks that the powder-dry cement, once out of the hold of a ship and moving into the silos along the plant's conveyors, can flow like a liquid. He smiles the smile of a man in love with his work when he talks about his crew (five full-timers, including himself, and four part-timers), who wear many hats and demonstrate varied skills as they work together seamlessly to deal with everyday challenges that are an inevitable part of the workplace, even in this state-of-the-art operation. The St. Lawrence plant in Duluth is all about moving Portland Type I cement in bulk. The product comes in from the plant in Mississauga, Ontario, on ships, is moved into silos, rests for awhile and leaves the plant in train cars or in trucks.
The plant sits on 7.4 acres and has 840 feet of dock frontage. It has four silos with 10,000-ton capacity each and an interstice with the capacity of another 3,000 tons. St. Lawrence in Duluth has customers in Minnesota, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Manitoba and Ontario. Overall, the company has four cement plants, 23 distribution terminals, 43 ready-mix concrete plants, 17 quarries and two construction companies. The company supplies about 15,000 customers and has about 2,500 employees. The Duluth plant typically handles 16 to 20 ships a year and, with its Swedish-built auger doing the heavy lifting, can unload a ship in about 54 hours, nonstop, at the rate of 600 to 700 tons per hour. Rail cars to take loads to terminals elsewhere in the Upper Midwest are nearly always on site, and about 45 trucks a day rumble in empty and leave laden with the basic building material for American necessities: highways, bridges, patio blocks. And cement plants.
|
|||
