BLAIR — Moses Wengerd wears a safety vest as he sits below a giant flat screen, monitoring every phase of the sand-processing operation. He can remotely adjust temperatures in the drying plant or slow the speed of sand sliding down conveyors to the rail-loading station.
For the past year, Wengerd has been working at Preferred Sands, just down the road from his home in Blair, a community of 1,300 midway between La Crosse and Eau Claire. He was a construction contractor until the boom in sand-mining hit west-central Wisconsin.
“I helped to build (the plant) last year, and now I’m running it,” said Wengerd, one of 53 people working full time at Preferred Sands’ facility in Blair.
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