The bridge was one of several that were destroyed in a flood, but the only one that was privately owned. A dispute over the ruined bridge’s ownership, and the resulting delay in making repairs, made the front page of the local newspaper in 2014:
In OSM, the road had gone untouched for years after the TIGER import. No one had ever created a map note to report the issue. This is not entirely surprising, since OSM isn’t exactly a household name in the U.S. Local residents were understandably focused on getting Google to acknowledge the problem.
There had been a validator warning about a waterway crossing without a bridge, but even if someone had gotten around to resolving that issue, I’m unsure if they would’ve correctly identified the bridge as being impassable without without some local knowledge. In some of the available aerial imagery sources, the bridge is obscured by tree cover, and in others, the gaping hole looks kind of ambiguous. The nearest street-level imagery was taken from a distance, and the kind of barricade used there might easily have been mistaken for a temporary construction barricade.
The same day that the local newspaper reported about the accident, a new user made their first edit to remove the bridge. They mentioned the accident to justify the edit. Another mapper quickly followed up to map some presumed barriers to prevent someone from unknowingly restoring the connection. The accident also caught the attention of mappers in OSMUS Slack a couple days later, once it made national headlines.