It was a treacherous daily trip across the decrepit Qiantun village bridge and this time it ended badly, as many had feared.
At dawn, the old bridge was muddy after the previous day's rain when Li Maotong, 52, and his wife, Li Shiping, 47, rode their motorbike heading out of the Hebei village on August 2.
They were most of the way across the 200-metre bridge, a narrow muddy span just four metres wide with broken rails and deep cracks in the roadbed.
Suddenly, the bike slid out from under them, and they slipped over the edge, falling six metres to the hard riverbed below. 'I passed out for like five seconds and felt blood gush out of my nose,' Li Maotong said. 'Not far away I saw my wife bleeding and not moving at all.'
Li suffered a few scratches and a fractured brow. His wife broke two ribs and her spine and may never walk again.
Li Shiping cannot afford the surgery needed to mend her back. She lies half naked on a wooden bed in her hot room, hoping that by lying straight the wound will heal. She is frustrated and angry but barely has strength to speak.
The bridge that the couple, and hundreds of other villagers, commuted on daily is just one of the tens of thousands of unsafe bridges on the mainland, many built in the 1970s and identified as hazardous by the government in recent years.
