City of (bad) bridges
Two years after Fern Hollow collapse, no progress on city bridge safety
Twoyears ago, one of the worst infrastructure disasters in Pittsburgh history occurred: the collapse of the Fern Hollow Bridge carrying Forbes Avenue over a Frick Park ravine. In the ensuing 24 months, state and federal authorities, with some support from the City of Pittsburgh, replaced the bridge in record time — but progress on shoring up Pittsburgh’s other bridges has been halting, and there have been few indications city officials have learned anything from this momentousfailure.
Pittsburgh operates in an unfavorableenvironment for repairing legacy infrastructure: In practice, the city generally gets the table scraps of federal funding left behind after the state and counties have taken their fill. But as much as Fern Hollow was a funding failure, it was much more clearly a bureaucratic failure — a reality underscored by documents released in recent weeks by the National Transportation Safety Board, whose report onthe collapse is due next month.
We wrote on the first anniversary of the collapse: “Complacency and incompetence still define Mayor Ed Gainey’s policies and practices on repairing and maintaining the city’s crumbling bridges.” Those words remaintrue one year later.
Minimal progress
The transportation funding system does not work for cities like Pittsburgh, with its large size and aging infrastructure. The city of 300,000 competes on par with, and often at a disadvantage with, counties with smaller populations (54 of the state’s 67 counties have fewer people) and less complexinfrastructure needs.
Around the state, Metropolitan Planning Organizations like the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission (SPC), allot state and federal infrastructure and economic development funding. Given the expense involved with major bridge rehabilitations, almost all projects undertaken by the City of Pittsburgh appear on the SPC’s Transportation Improvement Program (TIP) list, with the city ponying up 5% while federal funds cover the rest.
Despite the appearance of renewed urgency since the collapse, however, Pittsburgh has made little or no progress getting its bridge repairs funded. While the Mayor of Pittsburgh has a seat on the SPC executive committee alongside representatives of each county, Mr. Gainey has a notably poor attendance record, which has improved only somewhat since the PostGazette reported on his absences last year.
Mr. Gainey’s 2024 capital budget includes construction on a single span, the closed Charles Anderson Bridge that carries the Boulevard of the Allies over Panther Hollow. Beyond that, the city is only committing $150,000 of its own money, and about $3 million in federal money, to design and to right-of-way acquisition on eight other bridge projects. Some of those projects have been on the TIP and in “design” for several years.
And then there’s the California Avenue (or Robert McAfee) Bridge, between Marshall-Shadeland and Brighton Heights. The budget states, “The deck and sidewalks are in a state of advanced deterioration. Intervention
is required for the safety of those traveling over and under the bridge.” The 2023 budget anticipated $900,000 in spending in 2024. But in the 2024 budget, the funding was postponed to 2025. Whether it will get postponed once again to 2026, we’ll have to wait anotheryear to find out.
Basic maintenance
One lesson of the Fern Hollow Bridge, however, is that the failure to perform expensive rehabilitations isn’t the most dangerous problem for Pittsburgh’s bridges: It’s the failure to perform basic maintenance. New NTSB documents show that a primary contributing factor to the bridge’s demise was something very simple:its drainage was clogged.
Scuppers are the grates on bridges that are meant to give water a safe way to filter to the ground. When they become clogged, water seeps into the structure itself, forming and expanding cracks in concrete while corroding steel elements. Cleaning them out requires some moderately specialized equipment and training, but it’s basic, easy maintenance, akin to a homeowner replacing furnace filters or replacingsmoke alarm batteries.
But it didn’t happen. Fern Hollow’s scuppers were completely filled with debris and even growing grass, which had begun to spout in the clogged grates.
How did this basic, necessary task not get done? Did it fall between departments? Did a bureaucrat mark it complete when it wasn’t? Was there any serious bridge maintenance accountability program at all? Answering these questions — and being straightforward with the public about it — may be the most important aspect of the Fern Hollow investigation. But the city has made finding that answer as difficult as possible.
Avoiding accountability
While Mr. Gainey punctuates every public appearance by touting the Fern Hollow rebuild, which the city had very little to do with, his administration continues to refuse to allow a public and candid reckoning with the city’s original failure. His lawyers foughttooth and nail to hide city documents not only from the public, but from the attorneys representing Pittsburghers injured in the collapse.
After months of this rigmarole, in an absurd irony, the plaintiffs’ lawyers got what they needed — in documents released to the public by the NTSB. Pittsburgh’s public safety argument for withholding the information — that releasing the documents might reveal vulnerabilities to bad actors— now looks ridiculous.
One of the bright spots of the city’s response was the comprehensive Bridge Asset Management Program, which the administration commissionedin July 2022, and released to the public as a remarkably detailed report in December of that year. But the administration has barely mentioned it since, and there is no way for the public to know if any of the plans or recommendations have been followed through.
Two years after the Fern Hollow collapse, there’s no reason to believe Pittsburgh’s bridges are any safer — and, if they were, there’s no way to know. And at this rate, we fully expect to have to write the same words next year, as well.