order Darlene had shown Collins, the photographs of the broken gate, the survey map, and the recent inspection I had commissioned after the spring floods. Then he asked me whether the bridge had ever been dedicated as a public highway or conveyed to the county. I told him it hadn't, and offered fifteen years of deeds and almost three decades of maintenance receipts to support the answer.
"Good," Mitch said. "Because there's a difference between people being allowed to cross a structure and owning the structure. There's also a difference between somebody claiming there's a hazard and having authority to remove it. But don't mistake a strong claim for a quick case. They're going to fight."
We sought an emergency order protecting the remaining stonework and preventing further entry for demolition. We also filed for damages, including the value of destroyed materials and related property losses, and reserved the reconstruction costs for proof through engineering estimates. The preliminary claim listed seventy-eight thousand dollars in already documented losses; rebuilding the bridge to its historical form would cost considerably more. Mitch made that separation explicit. He didn't want a court trying to untangle numbers that I had allowed to overlap because I was angry.
The county building inspector walked the site with me. He photographed the abutments, checked the permit history, and confirmed that his office had issued no demolition authorization. The bridge had been maintained, and its previous private inspection had identified repairs, not an emergency requiring immediate destruction. He would not rule