P&Q Profile: Hinkle Contracting’s Warren Hawkridge

By PQ Staff| July 31, 2018

Warren Hawkridge

P&Q: How did you make your way into the aggregate industry?

While in college at Central Washington University, I started working for a concrete and aggregate company, Ellensburg Cement Products, during the summer. The company was looking for summer help and had called the school looking for a student in the construction management program. The head of the department recommended me for the job and passed along to me the contact information and description of what they were looking for. It was a great job that taught me a lot about the materials industry.

I worked in the office in the morning and in the quality control laboratory in the afternoon. They also allowed me to help with quality control on a few project sites and visit their concrete plants, quarries and see their mobile crushing plants. At the end of summer, I continued to work part time during my final year of school, then graduated and started working for Rinker Materials.

Photo by Kevin Yanik

P&Q: When P&Q last visited you at Bourbon Limestone, an operation in Paris, Kentucky, Hinkle had recently completed a partial plant upgrade that incorporated some automation. How is the automated plant performing, and has the company added automation to other plants across the state?

The automation at Bourbon Limestone is working really well, as planned. The Etheridge system does a great job controlling the plant, and the TRAC-10 system on the Telsmith T400 cone crusher gives us real-time information on the cone’s performance and helps troubleshoot any problems. We are very satisfied with this project and are planning to include another Etheridge automation package to our next plant upgrade at a different location, hopefully next year or in 2020, depending on market demand.

P&Q: In terms of demand, what’s your outlook for Hinkle and the industry within Kentucky for the coming months?

The current stone market in Kentucky has low growth outside of a few key areas in the state where growth is higher. There is a real need for infrastructure investment throughout the commonwealth, which Hinkle will be well positioned to compete for when it happens. We have had a solid start to the season and have some projects in backlog that should have Hinkle finishing 2018 with higher volumes than 2017.