Resident gives take on Bowling Green bridge

To the editor:

(Just so you know the facts on the closure of the Poland Bridge, all information taken from The Brazil Times, the Terre Haute Tribune Star, and on location residents, who live on State Road 42, 5 miles from the center of this bridge. I have lived in this same location over half of my life, I am almost 80.)

I have witnessed INDOT spend millions of Indiana taxpayers money on the bridges and highway 42. In the past 10 years, millions of dollars have been spent on bridge maintenance and repair. Almost all the money was wasted and certainly not necessary. Yet in the past 70 years during my life time, the all important maintenance of the two bridges was never done. "You don't Believe it, Believe it", to coin a Ripley's Believe It or Not pun.

From June 8 to Sept. 19, 2015, the 42 Poland bridge was closed --103 days, almost four months. How many vehicles travel this stretch of highway in 24 hours? The answer, from INDOT, is 2,500 from 59 to Highway 231 to the east. It effected several small towns along the way and thousands of people. Collateral damage in dollars was millions in wasted time, total inconvenience, magnum discomfort and total frustration.

What was the total charge from INDOT? $1 million, look, don't believe it, Page 3 of The Brazil Times, Sept. 26, 2015. All you non-believers need to take notice.

1964 State Poem by Arthur Franklin Mapes

1. God crowned her hills with beauty

Gave her lakes and winding streams

Then He edged them all with wood lands the setting for our dreams.

2. Lovely are her moonlit rivers

Shadowed by those giant sycamores

Where the fragrant winds of summer played along the willowed shores.

3. I must roam those wooded hillsides

I must heed the native call, for a (Pegan?? not sure the word is right) voice

With in me, seems to answer to it all.

4. I must walk where squirrels scamper along a -

Rustic old rail fence, where a choir of birds

Are singing, in the woodland green and dense.

5. Indiana is my home land, it is paradise to me

There is no other place quite like it, no place I'd rather be.

6. Lovely are the fields and meadows

That reach out to hills that rise, where that

Famous Wabash River, wonders on thru paradise

(or the Eel River, think about it)

Foot Note: In 24 hours, 3,500 vehicles use the Bowling Green Bridge, INDOT count 2007.

Now, the final INDOT bomb! Poland Bridge and Bowling Green Bridge are about the same age, between 70-75 years old. Both suffer from the same thing, gross lack of maintenance. Yet, one is suitable for restoration and renovation, while the other is beyond repair. The supports under the bridge abutments, pillars for support, are still almost perfect. They have withstood not thousands, not millions but rather trillions of tons of flood type water pressure over the past 70 years. Again the question, why not restore both bridges and save the taxpayers over $10 million, $300,000 of Indiana taxpayers money. Same story is happening here as was the case with Poland Bridge, total neglect over the past 70 years in regular maintenance.

These two bridges are the gateway to not one but two great forest areas in Indiana. They are the Owen Putnam State Forest, all the way to the Ohio River. From State Road 59 to each bridge around 5 miles. The road's 42 and 46 are flat and straight to both bridges but from both on it is scenic forested and tranquil, simply beautiful. Why not keep a human artifact of workmanship and beauty so valuable to the citizens of, particularly, to the folks of Clay and Owen County?

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