Bollinger County
The pit is in the village, and the county is tenth of a hundred and nine
The Arab Mine records 5 employees and sits 0.33 miles from the middle of Zalma. For once there is no distance to explain away: the pit is in the village.
The county round it is another matter. Bollinger County restricts 19 of the 58 county-maintained structures it owns, 32.8%, which places it tenth of the 109 Missouri counties that maintain at least twenty of their own. The state county-maintained rate is 12.7%, so this is roughly two and a half times the norm.
That is not a local peculiarity either. The south-eastern Ozarks hold five of the ten most restricted county road networks in the state, and the reason is drainage: deeply dissected uplands need a great many small bridges, and a great many small bridges on a small county budget are what ends up posted and eventually failing.
For a truck the consequence is that a load out of here was routed before it was loaded, and the wear falls on running gear and brakes rather than on the engine. High hours against modest mileage is the expected shape of a machine from this corner, not a warning about it.
So the circle, and one crossing that takes nothing at all
Those county figures hold up close in. Within ten miles the national bridge file counts 73 structures; thirteen carry a posting and ten are coded below legal loads, and eight of the ten are the county’s own.
The lowest operating rating among them is 4.5 metric tonnes, well under the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump — so that crossing takes no commercial vehicle at all, loaded or empty, and it is a hole in the network rather than a limit on a load.
The lowest that does admit one is rated 13.5 tonnes, about 14.9 US tons, leaving roughly 2.5 tonnes of stone over the tare against the twenty-five a legal 80,000 lb truck carries. Two and a half tonnes is not a load worth the trip, so in practice that crossing is routed around as well.
Read the floor as an upper bound rather than a promise, too: it is a minimum inside a ten-mile circle, and at most sites measured this way a tighter crossing lies somewhere between ten miles and twenty. The routing does not stop at the edge of the map.
Log trucks and timber rigs out of the hill country.
- One bridge near here takes nothing at all.That is right — the lowest crossing within ten miles is rated 4.5 metric tonnes, below an empty tandem’s tare. It is a gap in the network rather than a limit on a load, and drivers here know where it is.