It was 15 years ago on this day that the bridge over the Macquarie River at Wellington came crashing down.
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But a court case over liability still remains unresolved.
Two men narrowly escaped death in the disaster which sent a semitrailer and Valiant utility plunging into the waters of the river.
The truck driver, 52-year-old Dubbo man Bill Comerford, escaped without serious injury but was to pay dearly in the years ahead as the cause of the accident was argued in the NSW court system.
Driver of the support vehicle, 57-year-old Garry Welling, was admitted to hospital with chest injuries.
Mr Welling had been pulled from his submerged vehicle by reluctant hero Bruce Carr.
But like Mr Comerford,
the catastrophe was to mar his life.
An excavator on the back of the truck hit the bridge's superstructure which subsequently collapsed, bringing the 70-year-old bridge down with it.
A subsequent court case
was told that the bridge was flawed but a ruling absolved the State Government of any liability, a conclusion which Mr Comerford appealed. That appeal is scheduled to be heard before the High Court in May this year.
All that was yet to unfold, however, on this day in 1989.
"There was this almighty noise and I saw the tail end of the utility and bridge falling," Robyn Quain of Quain's Store said.
As news of the catastrophe spread, suddenly the town was the most important in NSW.
State leaders converged on the site to determine what could be done to reopen the major thoroughfare to the west.
Then shire president Campbell Gregory recalls it as "one of my most unhappy times in local government.
"The government did not have a clue who its counterparts were in the federal government.
"Bruce Baird (the transport minister) went to England in the middle of it.
"We really could not get it sorted out 'til Bruce Baird came back.
"It was a disaster," he said. "The commercial part of the town just died."
Mr Gregory said he was getting ready for shearing ("just as I am now - nothing changes") when his mother, then 85, brought him the news after she received a phone call from shire clerk Col Arnold.
At first he thought she "must have got it muddled" but it was too true.
For months to come, the bridge collapse dominated life in Wellington and in much of the central west until the new bridge was finally opened with great fanfare on December 14 1991.