The Sheriff Said Burn It Down—Then the Old Man Fired Up His 1958 Autocar Wrecker and Saved theBridge
In the spring of 1987, after three days of the worst flooding Hardin County, Kentucky had seen in forty years, a log jam the size of a barn had wedged itself against the Millbrook Road covered bridge—the last bridge connecting sixty families on the north side of the Licking River to the outside world. The pressure was bending the bridge sideways. The county engineer said it would fail by morning. The state sent a crew with chainsaws and orders to cut the bridge loose and let it burn rather than risk it taking out the downstream dam when it collapsed. Sheriff Dale Pruitt agreed. "We burn it at first light. It's gone anyway." Then Roy Caswell showed up in the dark, alone, with a 1958 Autocar wrecker he'd been running since Kennedy was president. Roy was sixty-one years old. He'd pulled timber off this river for thirty years. Nobody called him. He just came. The sheriff told him to go home. Roy didn't go home. What happened between midnight and sunrise on April 9th, 1987, became the story that Hardin County still tells—about the night one old man and one old truck pulled a dying bridge back from the edge while everyone else had already given up. This is that story.
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