Loggers, log in!
The town of Bellevue can be excused for
feeling as though it’s being walked on like a doormat by the Bureau of Land
Management and logging companies preparing to drive through town with 40-plus
ton loads of freshly cut timber.
The city doesn’t know when these trucks
with their long, stacked loads of logs will come thundering out of Martin Canyon
onto Bellevue’s Main Street and roar southward to delivery points in Rigby and
distant Montana.
The BLM and its logging contractors, in
short, have made no arrangements with Bellevue officials for a coordinated,
well-managed trip through the city.
Bellevue Marshal Randy Tremble
understandably is troubled by safety implications—huge trucks mingling with
pedestrians and auto traffic. Second on his list of concerns is what the trucks
could do to the city’s pavement.
His preference, if BLM and its logging
contractors would deign to contact him and other officials, would be to shepherd
these giant loads through town at no more than 20 miles per hour in a convoy of
rigs, not simply allowing one or two at a time to pass through the city whenever
the mood suits loggers.
Likewise Blaine County Commission chairman
Dennis Wright, who recalls that loggers in the late 1990s "devastated"—that’s
Wright’s description—the Little Wood Road near Carey, turning the pavement into
gravel. He’s uneasy about what could happen today.
Speed and braking of the big trucks did
the damage, Wright remembers.
For his part, the occasionally wry
Commissioner Wright has some thoughts made in partial jest, but surely with some
merit in view of the indifference shown by BLM to Bellevue.
Wright suggests, for example, that the
city of Bellevue might install a series of speed bumps along Main Street, aka
State Highway 75, to force loggers’ speed to a snail’s pace.
And, he asks sardonically, what’s wrong
with installing eight temporary stop signs on Main Street to control speed
during the logging season?
A simpler solution is for BLM to pick up
the phone, arrange for a meeting with Bellevue and work out a sensible plan for
moving hundreds of tons of logs on mammoth trucks through a quiet community
without destroying pavement and menacing the safety of other users of public
streets.