Monday, April 07, 2008

Crews began tearing away the charred planks and blackened cables of the Dewey Bridge on Monday after fire gutted the 92-year-old structure that had spanned the Colorado River 28 miles north of Moab, Utah.

Flames blamed on a 7-year-old Grand Junction boy playing with matches Sunday afternoon had devoured the bridge’s creosote-soaked wooden deck and rails.

The fire forced an Afton, Wyo., family of five to flee the campsite they had just upstream from the bridge and irritated a Fruita woman who remembered that ranchers used to use controlled burns on the stream and river bottoms to avoid just such a destructive blaze.