Standard Ready Mix Opens New Plant
After careful planning and quick teamwork, Standard Ready Mix opens its new Sioux City plant.
Video by TYLER JENSEN/Ash Grove Cement
By Brady Jones
Lyman-Richey Corporation
People don’t get sentimental about buildings. We get sentimental about the memories that happen in them.
The spaces we live and work in connect us to our pasts, and while time can seemingly fly by, those buildings tether us to the moments that mark our lives over the years.
So it’s not a surprise that Mike Lunda was a little emotional as he handed over the keys to the old Standard Ready Mix plant in Sioux City, Iowa, to a woman from Cargill.
“It was kind of a sad and happy day at the same time,” he said. “Just looking back at the plant and remembering all the different people that I got to work with over the years. I had some great memories. I know I had to blink fast a couple of times as I handed over the keys to Jody.”
Standard Ready Mix is a bit of a family legacy for Mike Lunda.
His father, Melvin, worked for Standard, retiring in 2005 after more than four decades with the company.
Lunda officially started working for Standard in May of 1979, meaning he marked his own 40 years with the company this year. But he has been around the business for a lot longer than that — riding in his dad’s mixer truck when he was 5 years old.
At 17, Lunda worked at Standard’s Sergeant Bluff, Iowa, plant filling bins and unloading rail cars.
Later he drove mixer trucks and worked in the shop part time, welding and servicing equipment whenever they needed help, shoveling, and cutting a lot of fiberboard.
In 1992 he started working in the shop fulltime working on anything that needed repaired, including engine overhauls. He moved over to plant maintenance in 2001 and was promoted to plant foreman in 2017.
“My first week at Standard will be something I won’t ever forget,” he said. “I got to chip out six mixer trucks! I thought to myself, ‘What have you gotten yourself into?’ But everything must have gone well — I’m still here.”
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The location transfer was a years-long process. Originally, Lyman-Richey Corporation hoped to find a greenfield site with railroad access. But when that search was fruitless, the company switched directions and began looking at ways to utilize property it already owned across the street.
“The new Standard was plant was about a ten year planning process,” said Concepcion Ortiz, Standard Ready Mix operations manager. “We had looked at a few different sites around Sioux City and even where the old plant was. Originally Standard had two separate areas but they were separated by a city street.”
While the Lyman-Richey team was figuring out what to do, the Sioux City Chamber of Commerce had suggested the Cargill grain operations, which bordered the plant to the west, might be interested in purchasing the old Standard plant area.
“It was kind of a sad and happy day at the same time. Just looking back at the plant and remembering all the different people that I got to work with over the years... I know I had to blink fast a couple of times as I handed over the keys to Jody.””
“We originally didn’t feel the 11th Street property would have enough room to accommodate a new plant, as it was boxed in by the Floyd river canal and other bordering properties,” said Lyman-Richey’s President of Concrete Companies Jarod Hendricks. “It also had a vacated city street running into the property that provided shared access to the neighboring properties.”
The team decided to approach a neighboring business, Sioux City Insulation, to see if they’d be open to selling some of their lot space to give Standard some more room to build. To the team’s surprise, they offered to sell their entire property, which included a shop and office space.
Tony Swoboda, Lyman-Richey Corp. plant maintenance and construction manager, and Eric Sieh, CRH Americas Materials performance manager, jumped to action, drawing up plans for the new production site, while Lyman-Richey Corp. Real Estate Manager Carol White worked her magic, selling the original plant site while also buying the Sioux City Insulation property and the 12th Street access from the City of Sioux City.
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Using an old CON-E-CO central mix stack plant for the new location, the pieces all fell into place — literally.
“The culmination of buying and selling property combined with a well-planned plant site is how we successfully went from operating a well-maintained but tired production plant to a newly constructed central mix production facility that will serve our company and the community surrounding Sioux City, Iowa, well into the future,” Hendricks said.
Hendricks said the new location was completed reusing many components from other locations, saving the company a lot of money in the process.
With help from CON-E-CO plant engineers, the team was able to bring in an aggregate conveyor system and two stacked cement silos, including supporting structures from Gerhold Concrete’s Norfolk, Neb., location and Ready Mixed Concrete’s 87th and Maple Streets location in Omaha. They were also able to use a refurbished aggregates handling hopper system from the Century/Fordyce Concrete operations in Harrisonville, Mo.
“The new plant services a three state area and was designed to accommodate up to eight different aggregates and five cements utilized on Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota commercial and DOT projects,” Hendricks said.
“We worked with BASF to install a state of the art admixture handling system and used our new CRH contacts to evaluate and install high efficiency plant heat and lighting features. Our team was able to design a safe and highly functional pedestrian segregation plan with an entrance and exit to 11th Street and Steuben Streets utilizing the vacated 12th street access.”
The new plant also collects water through truck wash water containment and an above-ground storm water retention pond.
“These water containment features are piped back to the plant for production and plant washout,” Hendricks added. “Both were designed with a primary purpose of collecting and controlling site water runoff to meet environmental compliance requirements.”
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Standard Operations Manager Ortiz said there are two immediate benefits to the new location: improved work flow and safety.
“When the old plant was running, drivers would have to wash out in our secondary yard. There was never any room to washout at Standard. This always caused a bottleneck with efficiency. Now everything is contained in one area,” he said.
“Coming in and out of the old Standard location was always a challenge with the trucks going into Cargill. They line up down Steuben Street, which caused some visibility issues getting in and out. Now Cargill will stage their trucks there. The entire city is excited about this because Steuben Street will now be clear.”
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For Lunda, the transition is bittersweet — “It’s hard to just see the old plant sitting there,” he said — but overall he said the new location has been a good thing.
“The new plant is great, not just from the maintenance side, but in serving our customers better by making a better product more efficiently. It has many safety features, and from someone who works in maintenance, this is a great deal with how easy it is to lock-out-tag-out something.
“The layout is way better than what we had at the other plant, and I think once we get into our new offices it will be even better.”