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Historic Dewey Bridge lost to fire
By GARY HARMON
The Daily Sentinel
Monday, April 07, 2008
Crews began tearing away the charred planks and blackened cables of the Dewey Bridge on Monday after fire gutted the 92-year-old structure that had spanned the Colorado River north of Moab, Utah.
Flames blamed on a 7-year-old Grand Junction boy playing with matches Sunday afternoon had devoured the bridge?s creosote-soaked wooden deck and rails.
The fire forced an After, Wyo., family of five to flee the campsite they had just upstream from the bridge and irritated a Fruita woman who remembered that ranchers used to use controlled burns on the stream and river bottoms to avoid just such a destructive blaze.
It left Billy Bob Shupe, who grew up running cattle across the Dewey Bridge, a bit heartbroken.
Seeing the charred remains of the Dewey Bridge on Monday morning, Shupe said ?kind of touched the heartstrings a little.?
Driving cattle across the bridge was always a task unfit for the nervous, he said, because the narrow span allowed only a few cattle at a time to cross the river.
?You could see the water below you? through the decks, Shupe said.
?It would swing and sway when you?d put lots of cattle on it,? said Glenna Thomas, who owned the White Ranch downstream for several years. ?If you ran cattle, it was very carefully that you did it.?
The flames took away ?a neat little bridge to take my grandchildren to tell them stories? of the cattle drives and cold winters spent along the river, Shupe said.
The Dewey Bridge, though, was more than a memory spark.
For much of the 20th century, it was the link that tied the wildest parts of eastern Utah to western Colorado?s largest city, Grand Junction, and its medical services, grocery stores and other bits of civilization that didn?t travel well through the arroyos and ruddy escarpments of the Colorado Plateau.
Construction on the 502-foot-long suspension bridge began in 1915 and was completed in 1916 by the Midland Bridge Co. It was designed to support six horses, three wagons and 9,000 pounds of freight.
By the time he crossed it in 1985 to move to Castle Valley, Floyd Stougthon said it took a bit of nerve to drive his fully loaded station wagon across it.
Stoughton was among the members of the Castle Valley Fire Department who were called in Sunday to battle the fire.
?There was a lot of history in that bridge,? Stoughton said.
The plaque marking the bridge as a part of the National Register of Historic Places was untouched by the fire.
Firefighters called to the blaze knew almost immediately that they?d be unable to save the old structure, said Dave Vaughn of the Castle Valley Fire Department and the Grand County road department.
?It was cookin? pretty good when we arrived,? Vaughan said.
Grand County sheriff?s officials said the blaze started downstream with a boy playing with matches.
The fire, pushed upstream by an upcanyon wind, burned beneath the modern bridge that spans the river 100 or so yards downstream from the Dewey Bridge, then ran up through the sage, rabbit brush and Mormon tea, charring some streamside willows up to and beyond the Moab side of the bridge.
The white bridge succumbed to orange flame and black smoke as firefighters raced past the span and pinched off the blaze about 300 yards upstream.
Stubborn embers were still smoking Monday morning, even after overnight rains.
?You could feel the heat from the highway bridge,? said Tyler Fouss, a Bureau of Land Management law enforcement officer who was on the scene Sunday afternoon and Monday morning.
Thomas, who had ranched along the Colorado downstream from Dewey, said she was irked to learn how the fire started.
Ranchers years ago would routinely burn out bottomland such as the stretch that burned out of control, Thomas said.
They gave up those burns when newcomers called law enforcement to complain, she said.
?They made it impossible? to run ranches as the ranchers saw fit, she said. ?All those people from California and New York should have stayed in the city.?
Cattle-drive memories still linger over the bridge, though.
Lee Lobridge of Moab used to run cattle across, following them in a pickup back in the 1970s.
Driving carefully, ?You could just clip the mirrors on either side without knocking them off,? Lobridge said.
Many weren?t careful enough, Thomas said.
?A lot of people lost a lot of mirrors on that bridge,? Thomas said.
Some of them might have been frustrated at the wait in the fall and spring for the cattle drives.
He and his father, Bob, ran as many as 1,200 head of cattle across it, Shupe said. They could only work about 300 to 400 head a day across it, so they might spend as many as four days at the bridge, he said.
Ambulances also used the bridge routinely to take patients to St. Mary?s Hospital, Stoughton said.
The old bridge was replaced as a part of Utah State Route 128 in 1988 with the completion of the existing highway bridge. The change marked the first in nearly a century.
Dewey Bridge?s completion in 1916 meant there no longer was any business for the ferry across the Colorado at the tiny settlement known as Dewey.
It wasn?t until 2000 that an effort was completed to preserve the Dewey Bridge in an effort spearheaded by Dale and Wilda Irish of Moab.
?It was horrid,? Wilda Irish said of the blaze, which she drove to see Sunday night. ?I felt like I lost my favorite uncle.?
When the effort to save the bridge started in 1998, the old structure was actually in ?fair shape,? she said.
State officials and volunteers put chain-link along the inside of the rails to prevent falls into the river, repainted the structure, replaced worn planks and tightened the cables.
Now, it could well be too much to rebuild the bridge, Wilda Irish said.
?I don?t think we?ve got the patience,? she said.
There are questions whether the towers on either side of the river are capable of supporting a replacement bridge and whether the cables that still reach across the Colorado still have the temper for the job, she said.
?We found ourselves wishing it could be rebuilt but feeling in our hearts that there?s no way,? she said. ?Of course, I wouldn?t fight if anybody wanted to rebuild it.?
04-08-2008, 04:06 PM
Dewey Bridge Burns
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