Posted on 10/02/2024 7:53:00 AM PDT by Brian Mosely
A tiny town in North Carolina that’s just been devastated by hurricane Helene could end up severely disrupting the global supply chain for microchips and solar panels.
Nestled in the Appalachian mountains, the community of Spruce Pine, population 2,194, is known for its hiking, local artists and as America’s sole source of high-purity quartz. Helene dumped more than 2 feet of rain on the town, destroying roads, shops and cutting power and water.
But its reach will likely be felt far beyond the small community.
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
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LOL.
Third time. Must be true.
“This could be very, very bad, in the long term.”
Companies have reserves to meet short term needs.
Long term the mines, factories and railroads will be back up running.
Where have you been hiding out?
As long as the never-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste control-freak Dims allow them.
Busy. Caregiver for my mom for 8 years, retiring later this month. Trying to put the pieces back together.
If they don’t depend on the government, they can rebound in a flash. Fix the roads, fix the power grid, fix the communication network, and things will burst to life.
In about a year...yes. I grew up near there...been to Spruce Pines. The way in is not simple and the repair work will be hard...at least to the roads and rail line.
So the company hired a bunch of helicopters to ferry people to work and back (many living out of emergency shelters as they'd lost housing). And the helicopters were used to ferry parts to the Honda plant they supplied. For a supplier, shutting down an auto plant is a huge deal due to the costs involved (and often the automaker will try to charge the cost of the shutdown to the supplier at fault), not to mention idling the assembly lines of hundreds of other suppliers to that automaker. In this case there was a brief shutdown, but Honda actually commmended us for our efforts to keep them supplied under the very difficult conditions.
So yeah, if the trains can't run and the pipeline runs dry enough, expect similar efforts to get the quartz out. People aren't going to just wring their hands and sit around wailing.
They had better not expect any help from FEMA.
Everyone in the administration knows that the Appalachian region is just a hot-bed of Deplorables!
The area is teeming with the democrats NUMBER ONE ENEMY! - Independent minded, self reliant, conservative voting, GOD loving, patriotic, honest Americans.
I mean - it’s not like they were corrupt Ukrainian officials willing to hand over a big chunk of aid money as cash under the table to line the pockets of Biden, Harris, Pelosi
and their dingleberry butt kissers.
Good to see you around again! 
From all indications, Sibelco is well prepared with reserves of Iota 8 and being a very private and secretive company you’ll never hear anything more.
The whole region is a mess. I have friends in Weaverville.
Friends in Augusta still without power. The managed to text out yesterday.
“Everyone in the administration knows that the Appalachian region is just a hot-bed of Deplorables!”
Asheville is ANTIFA headquarters
Dasting. of all places...
I would find it hard to believe that an industry with a collective market cap of almost $8 TRILLION (yes, with a TR) is solely reliant on a quartz mine in NC.
It may be the cheapest, most well-run, perhaps the largest quartz mine. But quartz is a relatively common element, but you can be sure all these HUGE and very profitable companies have developed several sources of quartz.
On a side note, Augusta National Golf Club (site of the Masters every year) also uses this mine for their bunker “sand” because of its bright whiteness, the better for TV coverage. I’m sure they have a reserve as well.
I was reading about this the other day and came to the conclusion that the story is a lot over exaggerated. They appear to be a very large multinational corporation, but here is some info from their site which hasn’t bee updated since the weekend.
https://www.sibelco.com/en/news/impact-of-hurricane-helene-on-spruce-pine-operations
Just checking their site and coincidentally see that their US corporate offices are in the Ballantyne area of Charlotte, NC about 9 miles from my location.
https://www.sibelco.com/en/country/usa
Lengthy article on ZeroHedge from the other day: https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/modern-economy-rests-single-road-north-carolina-where-hurricane-collapsed-bridges
Read the article: “As far as we know, there’s only a few places in the world that have ultra-high-quality quartz,” according to Ed Conway, author of Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization. Russia and Brazil also supply high-quality quartz, he says, but “Spruce Pine has far and away the [largest amount] and highest quality.”
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