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Texas County maintains five bridges of its own. The state maintains 88 more inside the same county, and the neighbouring Carter County owns three against the state’s 43.

Nought of five is technically nought per cent restricted, and it is a meaningless number — the denominator is too small to say anything.

It is the third distinct version of the same trap. A metropolitan county whose city owns its own network reads as unrestricted; a large county that keeps its network open reads the same way; and here a rural county reads that way because the state highway system carries the traffic and the county owns almost nothing. Three different causes, one misleading figure, and in all three cases the county share is not the measure.

That count is small and it is real. Within ten miles there are 48 structures, eight carrying a posting and seven rated below legal loads — and not one of those seven is county-maintained, which follows directly from the county owning five bridges in total.

The lowest crossing that still admits a loaded commercial vehicle is rated about 20.8 US tons, which allows roughly 7.9 tonnes of stone over the tare of an empty tandem dump. Those crossings cut a load rather than refusing it.

The operator here reaches across a much rougher spread than this county does. Indian Creek Materials holds seven sites through the southern Missouri Ozarks — at Zalma, Hunter, Willow Springs, West Plains, Alton, Doniphan and here — and those counties are not alike. Bollinger restricts nearly a third of what it maintains and ranks tenth of 109. A machine from that company might carry the wear of the second-most restricted corner of the state or of a county with no real network of its own. The operator is the history, not the site.

The two operations here record 5 and 4 employees, and one sits 0.30 miles from the middle of town.

• My machine moved around between the company’s pits.Common with the operators down here, and worth telling us. Some of those counties restrict a third of their bridges and this one owns five in total, so where it actually ran says far more than who owned it.
• The county says none of its bridges are restricted.It owns five, so that figure means very little. Inside ten miles seven crossings are rated below legal loads and none of them belongs to the county — the state carries the traffic here.