CEMENT PLANT BUILT ON SOLID FOUNDATION

A view from the top of the tower at Lone Star shows the conveyor that moves cement to the company's barge terminal on the Mississippi River.

John Burian, operations director, stood in the limestone quarry adjacent to the plant.

Everything about the Lone Star cement plant is massive, from its 350-foot deep stone quarry to its 230-foot-long, rotating kiln.

The plant towers above the landscape on South Sprigg Street. From its quarry on the west side of Sprigg to its production plant and Mississippi River loading terminal on the east side, the Lone Star site encompasses about 2,000 acres.

The plant operates 24 hours a day, producing 1.2 million tons of Portland and masonry cement annually.

About 85 percent of the cement is shipped out by barge from the plant's loading terminal on the Mississippi River, said John Burian, operations director.

The cement is shipped to Lone Star's river terminals in St. Louis, Paducah, Ky., Memphis and Nashville, Tenn., and New Orleans.

Some cement is shipped by train to Lone Star's rail terminal in Brandon, Miss.

Cape area customers pick up cement at the local plant.

Burian said cement is one of the world's best bargains. "You can still buy it for 3 cents a pound."

Lone Star Industries Inc. has five cement plants in the United States, of which the Cape plant is the largest and most modern.

The Stamford, Conn., company's other cement plants are in Illinois, Indiana, Oklahoma and Texas.

Lone Star is the second largest domestically owned cement company in the nation, Burian said.

The Cape plant has about 200 employees. It is the largest user of electricity in this area, annually spending more than $6.5 million for power.

The plant also uses a lot of coal to heat its kiln.

"We were burning 700 tons of coal a day," Burian said.

But in the past three years, the plant also has been burning shredded rubber and toxic waste fuels, such as used oil and paint thinner. Burian said the move has cut the plant's coal use by about 40 percent.

There has been a cement plant at that site since 1910 when Portland Cement Co. started production. Marquette purchased the plant in 1923.

Lone Star Industries bought the Marquette plant in 1982. Since then, the plant has been completely upgraded.

Lone Star was founded in 1919 as International Cement Co. It became Lone Star Cement Corp. in the 1930s when its headquarters was moved east. The name, Lone Star Industries Inc., was adopted in the 1960s.

Limestone is the main ingredient in cement. The Cape Girardeau plant has obtained its limestone from the adjacent quarry for 85 years.

Outfitted in a white hardhat, Burian drives a reporter and a photographer down to the bottom of the 350-foot deep quarry.

The wind whips across the rocky landscape. "There is nothing colder in the winter than a quarry or hotter in the summer," said Burian.

Some 1.6 million tons of limestone are quarried every year. The site has enough limestone to last another 20 years. After that, Lone Star plans to begin mining limestone from a site near Scott City. It is projected the new quarry has enough limestone to meet the plant's needs for more than 100 years, Burian said.

When the Sprigg Street site ceases to be a quarry, it could be filled with water and turned into a recreational lake, Burian said. "It would be quite a fishing hole."

In the quarry, huge front-end loaders scoop up large chunks of rock that have been blasted loose and dump them into equally large trucks.

Burian stands next to a front-end loader, dwarfed by its massive tires.

"One of these tires costs $10,000 or $15,000," he said.

The huge front-end loaders cost about $750,000 each; the massive trucks, $425,000 apiece.

The trucks dump the rocks onto a conveyor belt, which sends them through a crushing system that leaves each piece no larger than four inches.

The crushed limestone is stored at the quarry and then fed through a tunnel to a conveyor belt that ultimately carries it over Sprigg Street and into the plant.

Other materials such as silica and millscale, a waste product of steel mills, are added to the limestone.

The combined material then goes through a grinder. It is heated in a tower to around 1,700 to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit before being put into the kiln where the temperature is 2,750 degrees.

The result is something called clinkers, a dark brown or black material. Each clinker is about the size of a black walnut.

Clinkers are then ground in two huge metal drums filled with grinding balls. The drums can grind 200 tons an hour.

The finished product is the powdery cement.

The entire process is automated. The manufacturing operations are directed from computers in the control room.

The entire plant is outlined on one wall of the control room, with red, green and amber lights showing what equipment is up and running.