What is that in the road?

Editorial notebook

DRIVING through Nevada County of a Saturday afternoon, trying to get to Little Rock via U.S. 167 (through Camden and then Sheridan) to avoid the construction on I-30 . . . .

What is that ahead? Has there been a massive wreck? What’s with all the blue lights?

At least a dozen state highway trucks and electric vehicles blocked the road to Camden. Folks were out of their houses, phones at the ready. Others had parked along the road, holding phones and waiting to snap pictures.

Was the president of the United States coming down U.S. 278?

No, it was bigger than that. Bigger, as in literally. It was that 300-ton kiln furnace that’s been in all the papers.

If we’d read the papers closer, we could have avoided the blocked roadway at that time. But we call it a fortunate accident. Because we saw the kiln.

Reporter Daniel McFadin of this newspaper wrote that the kiln rested on a 12-dolly suspension beam dual-lane transport trailer, whatever that means. It was a cool thingamabob, if we do say so. Electrical trucks went ahead of it, pushing wires above the road high so that the kiln could slip under it on its way to the Veolia Thermal Hazardous Waste Treatment Plant in Gum Springs.

Assembled in Italy, shipped to the States, blocking the road in Nevada County, and giving folks something to take pictures of at the intersection of U.S. 278 and U.S. 371 in the most rural of rural Arkansas on a Saturday. Since there’s no football this time of year, nobody was in a hurry anyway.

So we did what everybody else was doing: We took out a phone and snapped pictures.