The remnants of Hurricane Helene ripped through the , Eastern North Carolina , rock city of , Spruce Pine , last year, disrupting a glass service integral to the world production of solar panels and semiconductor chips.
The largest , Spruce Pine , me is owned by Sibelco, a private , Belgium-based metal company that is Mitchell County’s top company. Sibelco told The , News &, Observer , Monday that the firm has “temporarily halted activities at the , Spruce Pine , services” since , Sept. 26.
” The storms has caused widespread flooding, power outages, communication problems, and damage to vital infrastructure in the area”, the emailed statement said. ” Some people in the area, including our employees and their families, are facing displacement and important problems”.
As of Saturday night, the wind had dumped more than 2 feet of weather on the town,  , submerging its city buildings , and overpowering place highways, railways, resources, and properties.
Sibelco’s mine are north of uptown in an area called the , Spruce Pine Mining District. From below, they look like giant white sandy beaches. The area is set up from the local , North Toe River, which flooded.
But media reports indicate surrounding , Mitchell County , has experienced substantial damage to roads and road lines, which may affect workers ‘ ability to get to the page and the agency’s ability to transport materials.
The town is home to the purest quartz on the planet, a byproduct of continental formations that took place more than 380 million years ago. The silicon wafers that end up in chips are made of high-purity quartz because it is essential. Although there are other sources of quartz, Spruce Pine’s mines are the only ones that produce the purity that many producers demand.
” It is rare, unheard of almost, for a single site to control the global supply of a crucial material”, wrote , Ed Conway , in his 2023 book” Material World”. However, it must come from Spruce Pine if you want to get high-purity quartz, the kind you need to make those crucibles without which you ca n’t make silicon wafers.”
Nowhere else matches the purity
Prior to now, the global supply chain for quartz had been hampered by facility issues. In 2008, a fire at a , Spruce Pine , quartz refinery “temporarily brought production to a halt and impacted the market” , , reported Global Risk Intel, a , Washington D. C. based consulting firm.
Throughout the 20th century, local miners extracted mica and feldspar from the , Mitchell County , sites, yet, in the past 30 years, escalating demand for newer technologies has made high-purity quartz one of North Carolina’s most important exports. Last year, Sibelco announced it would invest$ 200 million into the site by 2025 to double production. The business trades its quartz under the name IOTA.
” I’ve been sent to , Brazil, I’ve been sent to , Australia, and nothing matches the final purity of the , Spruce Pine , quartz”, local geologist , Alex Glover , said , during an interview , last March.
More recently, a second company named  , The Quartz Corp , has invested in mines around  , Spruce Pine. On Tuesday, the company announced it too had stopped operations on , Sept. 26, adding” we have no visibility on when they will restart”.
” This is second order of priority” , , The Quartz Corp , said in , an online post. The safety and well-being of our employees and their families is still top of mind.
Compared to Sibelco’s sites,  , The Quartz Corp , location is closer to the , North Toe River, aerial images on Google Maps show.
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