Douglas County
A thin network, and a third of it restricted
Four of the forty are rated below legal loads, three of them the county’s own, the nearest 4.80 miles out. Douglas County restricts 9 of 26 county-maintained structures — 34.6 per cent, sixth of the 109 Missouri counties that maintain at least twenty, against a state rate of 12.7.
This is one of five counties in the south-eastern Ozarks that between them hold half of the ten most restricted road networks in Missouri. Wayne County is second at 43.5 per cent, Reynolds third, this county sixth, Oregon seventh and Bollinger tenth.
And the reason is drainage rather than neglect
Those counties are not badly run. Deeply dissected uplands need a lot of small bridges, and a lot of small bridges on a small county budget is what ends up posted — the same relationship measured in Kentucky, in Tennessee and in four separate parts of Missouri.
It is also one of the counties where more structures fail on load than carry a posting at all: nine against eight here. Across the state that holds in thirty-four of the 109 comparable counties, so a posted-sign count would miss restrictions across a third of rural Missouri while overstating them in the metropolitan parts.
For a truck the consequence is that a load out of Ava was routed before it was loaded, and the wear falls on running gear and brakes rather than on the engine. The quarry here records 5 employees, 4.00 miles from the middle of town, and Wright County next door sits on the same kind of ground.
Around the Ava Quarry, and across Douglas County and Wright County, this town turns over a steady amount of it.