Junction City Mining "Digs" Quick Start 
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At the edge of a geological fall line in rural Talbot County, where granite and clay give way to limestone and sand, Junction City Mining Company has set up a state-of-the-art facility to mine granite aggregate used in road construction. Huge mounds of different sizes of the dark gray gravel stand at the far reaches of the mining area ready for washing and loading onto railroad cars. Each car leaves the mine with somewhere between 200,000 and 220,000 pounds of Georgia granite. Once the mine is working at full capacity, this will mean from 30 to 40 railroad cars per day hooking up to the CSX and Norfolk and Southern Railroad lines, with most heading to Florida.
Junction City Mining Company employs approximately 40 skilled workers to run the heavy equipment and oversee the process, and several contractors to maintain the gigantic equipment necessary for the production. "With their excellent pre-hire training, Quick Start was able to help get us up and running. We'd probably still be struggling with getting a workforce in place if it weren't for Quick Start," says George Brewer, the mine's manager and a 28-year veteran of the business. The company had more than 200 applicants for the 40 jobs, 40 percent , of whom needed fairly extensive training in math, metrics, and precision measurement, in addition to rigorous safety training mandated by the federal government's Mining Safety and Health Administration. "Gone are the days when we used to hook up the fuse for the explosives to our truck batteries and dive for cover," laughs Brewer, as he looks out over the efficient towers of crushers and conveyor belts crisscrossing the horizon. Trucks and earth-movers the size of small houses roll across the terrain, transporting boulders extracted from the Pit with ammonium nitrate explosive to the 70-foot tower that houses the steel crusher. "We are a relatively small company and could not have afforded in time or money the necessary screening for hiring a good workforce," explains Brewer. "Quick Start filled the gap for us and contributed a great deal to our ability to get up and running." QS |
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