On Thursday, September 26, 2024, at around 11 at night, Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida.

Over the following days, the storm tore across Georgia and Tennessee before colliding with the Blue Ridge Mountains

in the Carolinas.

The impact was pretty much immediate devastation.

As the country watched all this death and disaster unfold, there was an unusual side story buried within,

this strange footnote that carried its own potential economic disaster.

Among the towns hit hardest by the storm was a little town in North Carolina called Spruce Pine, which received around 24 inches of rain.

With a population of just over 2,000, Spruce Pine might seem like just another small

mountain town, but it's actually one of the most important locations in the world for the functioning of our modern economy.

That's because Spruce Pine is home to some of the purest quartz on the planet, essential for producing the polysilicon used in nearly every computer chip made today.

This tiny town plays a huge outsized role in powering the global tech industry and frankly in everything

else the fridges, microwaves, cars, you name it. Without it, the world's supply of semiconductors would grind to a halt.

Remember the whole point of this course is its pure. The whole point is its clean.

So if suddenly you've got mud and silt inside the storage

facilities where this incredibly poor stuff is kept and it's mixing with it, then a lot of that

stockpile suddenly is useless.

For a few days, this question of Spruce Pine added a tense overton to the disaster.

There was questions about whether the mines were submerged, about how long

they would be down for, and what would happen to the supply chain.

Initial reports indicate that there is not major damage, and it is unlikely we'll see a big supply

chain disruption. But this close call at Spruce Pine pretty starkly illustrates this issue of pinch points across the globe, places where something

can go wrong and an entire industry grinds to a halt. Spruce Pine is far from the only example.

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