Hickory County
Forty-three crossings, and a radius that measures the wrong thing
Within ten miles the national bridge file counts 43 structures, and the thinness is the whole story here rather than a detail of it.
Six carry a posting and six are coded below legal loads. All six of the restricted ones are the county’s own, and the nearest is 3.95 miles out.
The posted group is unusual. Its median operating rating is 9.9 tonnes, which sits below the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump — so the typical posted structure around this pit will not take a commercial vehicle even with nothing in the body.
The lake takes the crossings the valleys made necessary
Hickory County has 8 of the 28 structures it maintains coded below legal loads — 28.6 per cent, against 12.7 across Missouri’s counties.
It is not alone in that, and the neighbours make a shape rather than a scatter. Camden runs 17.9 per cent, Miller 21.9, Morgan 22.0, Osage 29.2 and Maries 33.3. Cole County, sitting beside them, runs 1.0.
Two things work together to produce it. The Osage and the Gasconade cut deep valleys into the Ozark rim, and a valley needs a great many small bridges. Then the Bagnell Dam flooded the Osage in 1931 and took crossings out of what was already there.
So a ten-mile circle drawn round this pit measures what is near rather than what is reachable, and the gap between those two is wider here than in most of the state. A market that looks circular on a map is really a set of lobes with water between them. The loads out of this pit were chosen for the way out before they were chosen for anything else.
When one of them does meet a restricted crossing, the lowest that still admits a commercial vehicle is rated 16.2 tonnes, about 17.9 US tons — roughly 5.2 tonnes of stone over tare, against the twenty-five a legal 80,000 lb truck carries.
Farm trucks and grain hauls off the ridges. Around the lake and across Hickory County and Camden County, this country turns over a steady amount of it.
- The lake meant it always went the long way round.Around here the water decides the route before the load does, so a truck out of this country has usually run more miles per tonne than its hours suggest.