Hurricane Helene barreled through a crucial chip mining area in North Carolina

Hurricane Helene brought historical rainfall and flooding to occidental North Carolina past week, leaving dozens dormant and catastrophic damage stretching crossed the state’s upland towns. The devastation besides reached the tiny municipality of Spruce Pine, which is location to the purest quartz connected Earth.

Spruce Pine’s high-quality quartz is an indispensable constituent successful the chip-making process, arsenic it’s the lone people occurring source of the ultra-pure mineral. The quartz mined from this country is utilized arsenic a crucible to melt polysilicon, which is past utilized to nutrient silicon wafers — the basal of a semiconductor.

But with connection successful the portion inactive highly difficult, it’s been hard to find whether the 2 mining companies that run successful the municipality — Sibelco and The Quartz Corp — are affected.

“We are successful a signifier of assessing the concern and it is acold excessively aboriginal to remark connected the interaction to precocious purity quartz production,” The Quartz Corp. spokesperson May Kristin Haugen said successful a connection to The Verge. “Our precedence present is radical and the families being affected by this unspeakable storm.” We reached retired to Sibelco with a petition for remark but didn’t instantly perceive back.

As pointed retired by Wired, a 2008 Spruce Pine fire “all but unopen disconnected the proviso of high-purity quartz to the satellite market, sending shivers done the industry.” If the 2 mines sustained harm this clip around, the interaction could beryllium adjacent greater fixed the world’s accrued reliance connected chips to marque phones, processors, star panels, and different technology.