Beaver Tale

I sometimes think it's bad when our creeks are up, and I have to take a detour to get to town. But actually, I'm very lucky, ever since our bridge down by the mailboxes was rebuilt about 10 years ago. Before that, I sometimes had to drive way up north to get on the interstate (!) to have a way to get to work. That was very stressful to me, since I have a phobia about driving on the interstate. So there I'd be, Genius riding shotgun, my mom on the phone to talk me through it, The Pony oblivious to it all... white-knuckling my way down the interstate until I got to the first town where I could get off and get to school.

Apparently, some people had it worse than that last week. I read about it in the Daily Hillmomban. Who wouldn't click on an article with the title: Beavers Cause Havoc.

I'm not sure where the road is, but 15 families rely on this bridge to get to their homes. Which are on a dead-end road. So there's no coming in from another direction. They have to cross that bridge. Seems that they had a problem with a sinkhole. It was going under their bridge from the side of the road, causing part of it to collapse.

The county road department went out to look at it, and filled in a bunch of gravel to get them through the weekend. Then they started looking at what was causing the sinkhole. They determined that something had clogged the big pipe that ran under the bridge. So water had been backing up on that side, and with heavy rain, that water had swirled around, trying to find a way to get under the bridge. That created the sinkhole, which was eroding away the road.

Road crews found out that BEAVERS had built a dam inside the pipe, blocking water from passing under the bridge. The plan was to put in a larger pipe, which would require closing the road. They notified the 15 families that they would not be able to get into or out of their neighborhood from Monday at 9:00 a.m. until whenever the work was done. Which turned out to be 11:30 p.m. on Monday.

Since they knew about it, people parked their cars on the other side of the bridge so they could get to work on Monday. I don't know HOW they got themselves on foot across that bridge. Maybe there was a sliver of road left, maybe they could ford a creek, maybe the county crew drove them across on heavy equipment, maybe they walked a tightrope. Those local reporters need to get all the facts!

Anyhoo...the road department had to dig down 20 feet to put in the new pipe. The next morning, they found out that the beavers had already dammed up the NEW pipe! So one of the workers crawled up in that new pipe to dismantle the beaver workmanship. I think that guy deserves a bonus! What if that guy got trapped in there with some ANGRY BEAVERS? Besides, didn't water start running into the pipe when he took the dam apart? I'm tellin' you, that reporter needs to spend a day in a pipe 20 feet underground, dismantling a beaver dam! Then maybe he'll learn what real work is like, and make a better effort to get all the facts for his own cushy job!

The spokesman for the road department said that the beavers would be "humanely removed" from that area. To me, that means a swift bullet to the head. But maybe they'll go to the time and expense of trapping them and turning them loose in another part of the county where they can destroy someone else's bridge.

It's job security for the road crew, you know.