LIBERTY — Amite County supervisors say swimmers are to blame for the recent removal of railings on Mary Wall Bridge spanning the East Fork of the Amite River.
Supervisors say 40-foot sections of the creosote railings are often removed by chainsaws to give swimmers room to dive into the river from the 100-foot-long span. The sections are usually dumped into the river, supervisors said.
“I’ve heard of the Mary Wall Bridge swim hole ever since I was a kid,” said board of supervisors attorney Reggie Jones.
The bridge located south of Liberty was the scene of an August 2009 accident that killed a McComb college student after the pickup truck in which she was riding went off the bridge. Officials at the time said the railings had been removed and said such thefts were a persistent problem.
“We’ve replaced railings on that bridge four times since that wreck,” said Max Lawson, the county supervisor for District 5, which includes the southern part of the bridge. “It’s a regular swimming hole. We’ve ridden through there at different times of the day. We’ve seen people down there swimming, but we couldn’t say they were the ones that were doing it because we didn’t ever see anybody take them. We just can’t catch the people who are doing it.”
The railings supervisors put up five weeks ago remain in place.
Those found vandalizing the bridge railings face misdemeanor charges of destruction of public property and fines.
“Nobody lives close enough to that bridge to stop it,” Lawson said. “It’s a real rural area out there. We can’t catch anybody doing something like that out there because it is so rural.”
The other three-fourths of the bridge lies in District 2, Supervisor Will Powell’s jurisdiction.
He said it takes a lot of time and effort to replace the railings.
“We’ve got to spend the extra time to see if the rails are still up,” Powell said. “We’ve got to get the material to put them back up if they’re down. If we don’t have the material, we’ve got to shop around and then put the rails back up.”
Powell said he would like the county to put up iron railings, but he wonders if it can afford such material.
“It may be too costly. None of the other county bridges have iron railings,” Jones said. “Iron railings would not stop them from jumping into the river. It may be more dangerous. They could climb to the top of the bridge and jump off.”
