Ancient Shipwreck Uncovered in Southie...

“Lime ships had a tendency to burst into flames.”

But other than that, Captain, how was your voyage?

I worked at a quarry that mined cement grade limestone and had a "baking plant: adjoining in order to make anhydrous lime and cement grade lime. They would bake all the water out of it and crush it until it was like confectioners sugar. Then they would "Pipe it" into trucks that were covered and pretty much water tight. (This was in W Virginia where they would get horrible summer showers of 2 to 4" rain in a half hour.
Once, apparently some wags had washed their anyhrdous lime rig and left some water in the water tight bays (the trucks had 4 bays).
The plant loaded them up as a last load until they would quit because of a storm warning. WELL. the water in the one bay reacted with the anhydrous lime and the thing just blew up. It blew the tops off the rig and (they are held on loosely so they would just break off in case of this happening). When the top blew off, it was rainin g and the rain got hold and reacted the other three bays of lime and we had a huge hot steam fire that was mostly the water
We had a drill crew going in the area of the plant to where the quarry was going to be extended . They ducked under the drill table to keep from getting rained on by debris and burning chunks

It sounded like a muffled thunder storm with smoke, steam, and chunks of truck flying and tires rolling about. Fortunately noone was hurt. There is enough time of hissing and smoke going till it goes critical.

Ill bet george ob has some tales to tell about fluid bed incinerators that can "go critical" and start burning from just water on the limestone beds.

My native town had had one lime and seven cement works, when I was young. (And when my mother was young, some couples more).

Nowadays, just three cement works are left.
Interesting, what they do with the old quarries (now, until 30 years ago, they were filled ...mainly with rubbish)

We turn them into pubs.

they would do that around Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio and other states with big limestone deposits. Its just that the cement kilns needed a special chemistry (very low magnesium) in order to make decent cement. If you had such a resource, filling them with trash is a waste of concrete as well as an environmental problem. (Old trash pits can contaminate drinking water)

You can read a bit about the cement industry in my native town >here< (pdf-download)

Those quarries, which are still in use, can be seen on this google-view

Heidelberg was one of my clients (while I still owned the company). My partners work for them now. They hqve cement plants and quarries all over the world. The Pa limestone is often used to "Sweeten" various cement rocks. (Most limestones are sandy and have a lot of Magnesium in the form of dolomite. That makes really crppy cement (We call it mwxidan concrete because it was used on lots of the new hotels in Mwxico and whenever they get some really heavy rqins, the concrete just splls off. The crystal structure of dolomite nd calcite (reqlly high Ca limestone) are very different nd they dont bond well on hydration reactions.
SO, much of our limestone "buff" is sent all over to make theC concentrtion higher. It looks like from the one XRF plot from your rea, they would be sweetening their mixes. You want Ca at least 30% and Mg<<4%.

Concrete mixes are really high tech bit of pastry baking. They have many uses for many mixes. They use polymer inserts, flyash and volcanic dusts, sweetening agents, silica dust, and many many other secret sauce chemicals that help the concrete set in temps as low s 20 degrees F, and impart all kinds of strength and durability properties.

Dont ask me any questions or Ill "go -------" on you and youll never shut me up about cement mixing.