Nine people, and a restricted crossing half a mile from the gate
Within ten miles of the gate the bridge file records 186 structures, of which 36 are posted for load and 34 are coded below legal loads — 18.3 per cent, close to one crossing in five.
Half a mile. Whatever route leaves that pit, it starts by working around something.
The county tier
Here the county actually holds the road, and posts half of it
Those thirty-four restrictions break down in a way that is unusual for this state: twenty of them are county-maintained. The state highway department maintains 89 per cent of every structure in South Carolina, and most county tiers are too small to mean anything.
Anderson County maintains 133 bridges and posts 59 of them — 44.4 per cent. It is the third largest county tier in South Carolina and nearly half of it is posted. Set that against York County, which maintains three bridges and posts none: two counties in the same state where the question “is the county road the problem” has opposite answers.
The crossing that sets the ceiling here is a county road 9.31 miles out, rated 16.8 metric tonnes, about 18.5 US tons — roughly 5.8 tonnes of stone over the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump. The raw minimum among the thirty-four is 3.9 tonnes, well under that tare, so most of what is restricted near this pit takes no commercial vehicle at all and the number that actually binds is the next one up.
Box trucks and straight trucks are not a county-road thing in particular — they are everywhere.
Short stone runs out of a gate 6.40 miles from the middle of town, threading around a restriction 0.52 miles from the gate, are where a lot of it turns up.
- Tell us the hours if you have them — a truck that ran long ways round at low speed has done more work than its odometer says.
Around the quarry gate 6.40 miles out, and on the county roads that carry it past a restriction 0.52 miles away, the same trucks come up for sale for the same reasons.