Koppers Closed the Still, Then Idled the Treater

Koppers put out its third quarter on Friday, and somewhere in the CEO's opening quote a plant goes dark.

The company is "beginning to realize the benefits of several large self-help initiatives," the quote says, "including the accelerated Stickney closure and the idling of our Florence treating plant."

That is the entire disclosure.

No state. No tonnage, no headcount, no last working day, no condition under which it comes back.

"Florence" appears exactly once in the document, and the release moves straight on to segment margins without ever telling you what it just closed.

So we went and found out.

The Plant That Lost Its Own Web Page

Florence is Florence, South Carolina, and it is one of the oldest assets in the Koppers network.

The company's own location page described it as a 210-acre site that has been "an active wood treating and preserving plant since 1946," producing crossties, switch ties, bridge material and preplated crossties, plus kiln drying for utility poles and piling. Treating there ran on P-2 creosote with a borate dual treatment.

Described, past tense. That page is gone.

koppers.com/company/locations/florence-plant returns a 404 as of this evening. The same URL pattern still resolves for Eutawville, the company's other South Carolina plant, which sits there at a clean 200 and still advertises treated utility poles.

And the live locations index now contains zero occurrences of the word "Florence."

We are not going to tell you the page came down because of the idling, because nobody said that. What we will tell you is that a plant Koppers has run for eighty years went from a location page to one clause in a quote, and that the only public description of what it makes is now a cached copy.