Protect Your Potatoes

This illustration, taken from Protect Your Potatoes, depicts the first Monolithic Dome potato storage we built. It can hold five million pounds of potatoes. To control temperature and humidity we spray our domes with urethane and provide air-circulating systems.

While they’re not wheeled down a Dublin street by Molly Malone singing “Alive! Alive Oh!” staying alive is as important for potatoes as it was for the cockles and mussels Molly did wheel. In fact, keeping those spuds alive while they sleep in storage is the one vital goal of a potato-storage facility. That’s because a potato is a living organism, that can stay asleep and alive for a long time if it’s properly stored. But if it’s not, it will die and rot very quickly.

Monolithic’s Grain Covers for storage

A tubelike tower, with a lifting ring that can slide up and down the tower, stands in the center of the grain cover. The middle of the grain cover fits around the tower, while its bottom is secured to the fence.

“Monolithic has one of the largest radio frequency or RF welders in the world,” said David B. South, Monolithic’s president. "An RF welder produces heat and fuses materials with radio frequency energy, akin to microwave energy. The result is a weld that is every bit as strong as the original material.

Another Monolithic Benefit: EMP Safety

EMP is short for ElectroMagnetic Pulse, a burst of electromagnetic radiation caused by a high-energy explosion that can be manmade or nature-made.
Monolithic now introduces EMP safety. A Monolithic Dome with the right components can protect its occupants and/or equipment from EMP devastation — definitely something to be ready for. Each year, more things become capable of producing electromagnetic pulses. And nature seems to be creating more of these pulses as well.

An Important Revisit: Monolithic’s First Fertilizer Storage Plant

With two layers in place, workers had to be careful as the concrete wainscot was very rough, but the project continued successfully.

Knowing that a Monolithic Dome would make an ideal fertilizer storage, in 1978 I sent information to a fertilizer magazine. They wrote an article, featuring the Monolithic Dome as a new product, and I received a call from Bill Matthews in Chandler, Oklahoma. Bill wanted a fertilizer storage dome on a site just off America’s famous U.S. 66.

DuPont’s Monolithic Dome Hurricane Shelter

Hurricane Shelter at DuPont’s Mississippi Gulf Coast Facility

In 2004, Monolithic designed a dome for DuPont. They wanted a structure that could survive a category 5 (155+ mph winds and 18+ foot surge) hurricane, for their plant in DeLisle, Mississippi. It got tested by Hurricane Katrina.