A look at those ‘bad roads’ being complained about in Wayne…and a word about the underground river

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By admin

Published: February 27, 2010

WAYNE CO.—There’s a lot of complaining going on about the roads in Wayne County.

Anybody from Wayne County will know that in certain parts of the county, you can’t get away from bad roads…that’s because there are certain parts of the county that probably shouldn’t have roads. But our pioneering predecessors insisted on cutting roads through the bottoms of the Little Wabash River, so there you go. Now we trundle heavy grain trucks and farm equipment through there (because there’s so much nice topsoil being brought down the river in the floods, and all that fish poop to fertilize it, so ya just gotta farm it!) and our nice road bed down the center holds pretty good with all the gravel packed over the decades (and there for a while, when oil was reasonable, we had blacktop and oil and chip), but when two heavy vehicles have to pass each other…watch out.

So down the Mt. Erie/Goldengate blacktop, the shoulders are disappearing in this sloggy wet weather we’ve had the past couple of years. Alarmingly disappearing. It’s like the road crews are just concerned about that one, nice firm lane down the center of the road, not realizing that some of us, when going to visit the fam or headed out to work every day, are driving our own big vehicles like duallys and Dodge Durangos. And we slog down the soft shoulders even more. Then when the floodwaters come coursing over the roads, guess what they wash away? The shoulders. And we’re left with this one firm single lane right down the middle of this heavily-used county road to get us from the sticks to Highway 15, like you see in the pic above. When, of course, it’s not flooded over.

The floodwaters are nothing new; many of us learned to drive with several inches of water covering one road or the other out there, no big deal. But because the roads aren’t being maintained like they used to be, three or four decades ago when we were learning to drive, it’s becoming a much bigger deal than back then. Yet the road and bridge committee of the Wayne County board saw fit to give county engineer Art Loebach’s road crew big raises a few weeks ago without the input of the full board. When the full board met about two weeks later, they rescinded the raises. This was just another obscenity in the ongoing crap the Wayne County board pulls with disturbing frequency.

In the above pic, and the other one shown here, there is something else that oldtimers say Loebach needs to be taking into consideration: in this set of photos, we’re showing a section of Wayne where there’s said to be an underground river below it.

When Ang was younger she used to laugh at her dad when he detailed reasons why he and others in the Massilon area believed there was a subterranean river beneath that section of the county where the Little Wabash runs through. One reasoning regarded sections of the river where there are stone banks instead of mud, and where whirlpools remained constantly (old Dad said either the upper river fed the lower, the lower river fed the upper, or both, right at these whirlpools).

But another reasoning was that there were certain areas of the river bottoms that seemed to constantly be shifting…up and down. The fields, woods and roads would be higher, ever so slightly, one year than the year before; or lower in certain sections, as in subsidence.

One of those sections happens to be in the above center of the photo to the right. And while washout might have a lot to do with it, old Dad said that the road was soft and soggy year round in one spot, even during dry times, because that was a ‘rise’ in the underground river.

That particular spot was underwater today when we shot these photos. When the waters clear, we’ll get pics then.

But for right now, our Massilon friends and relatives are telling us that the road might remain closed even after the floods recede because there’s a “hole” in the road, making it impassible. We’d put money on it that this is probably the spot where old Dad said the underground river ‘rises’. We’ll let you know if it is.

In the meantime, let’s hope there’s not some kind of big line of traffic on this road when the Wabash Valley Seismic Zone decides to shift and the river decides to not stay ‘underground.’

Stranger things have happened…especially in Wayne County.

READ THE POST ANG PUT UP ABOUT THIS SUBJECT ON RUMORMILLNEWS!!

http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=168072

Tagged with: Art Loebach, bad roads, fish poop, flood, Goldengate, Little Wabash, Massilon, Mt. Erie, river, RumorMillNews, underground, Wabash Valley Seismic Zone, Wayne

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