Carter County
Nought per cent, out of three
The county’s share of structures coded below legal loads is 0.0 per cent, and that number is not what it appears to be.
Carter County maintains three bridges. Three. None of the three is coded below legal loads, so the share is zero — and a zero on a denominator of three is a fact about who owns the roads, not about what a truck can cross.
The state maintains 43 structures in the same county. Next door, Texas County owns five against the state’s 88. Both fall below the twenty-structure threshold used for comparing counties, so neither one can honestly be ranked at all.
This is rural country where the state highway system carries the traffic. We are not going to report a zero as though it meant the crossings here are clear, because absence and zero are different facts and this is the first of the two.
So the ten-mile count is the measure, and it is a light one
So what can be measured is the circle round the pit. Within ten miles the national bridge file counts 41 structures — seven carrying a posting, three coded below legal loads, two of those the county’s own, and the nearest 2.78 miles out.
The lowest rating among the three is 6.3 tonnes, under the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump, so nothing commercial crosses that one in either direction.
The lowest that does admit one is rated 21.6 tonnes, about 23.8 US tons. Over that tare it leaves roughly 10.6 tonnes of stone, against the twenty-five a legal 80,000 lb truck carries. That is a real cut, but it is not the kind that decides a route before the load is even chosen.
And because the state system carries the traffic here rather than the county, a truck out of this pit has spent most of its working life on state-maintained road. That is a different wear history from a county-road truck, and it is worth saying out loud when you come to sell it.
Log trucks and timber rigs out of the Ozark forest country.
- Is a county with no restricted bridges good news?Carter County maintains three bridges in total, so its nought per cent is about ownership rather than about the roads. The ten-mile count round the pit is the figure that means something.