“This allows our city’s Department of Mobility to get much-needed support from outside agencies that they don’t usually talk to every day,” O’Connor told Roads & Bridges. “It will also allow us on Council to take the recommendations and hopefully prioritize them.”
Another bill requires the city’s Department of Mobility and Infrastructure to provide regular, public update reports on the status of the city’s infrastructure. Security concerns prevent the city from being completely transparent.
“We’re trying to be as transparent as we can be with the public, who have a right to know this information,” said O’Connor, who played little league as a boy on the baseball field on the corner at the end of the Fern Hollow Bridge. “We’re not going to take any more risks. If a bridge should be closed in the future, it should be closed.”
PennDOT conducts 18,000 bridge inspections each year, which averages out to about 70 per day.
Pennsylvania has more than 25,000 bridges, and last year, by federal estimates, 3,353 of them were considered to be in poor condition. That is the second highest in the country. Only Iowa has more, with 4,571.
In 2008, there were over 6,000 state-owned bridges that were in poor condition in Pennsylvania. Today, that number has dropped. However, because of the age of its bridges, and the size of the commonwealth, 250 of its state-owned bridges move into that poor category each year, according to Acting Executive Deputy Secretary Melissa Batula.
“So we must preserve, repair, and replace at a greater rate each year to continue that trend of reducing the number of bridges that are in poor condition,” Batula said at a virtual press conference last month.
The IIJA should help Pennsylvania address its bridge problems. In January, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced that Pennsylvania would receive $1.63 billion over five years, including $327 million in 2022, to improve bridges.
Learning from what exactly happened to the Fern Hollow Bridge will likely influence how Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania officials put this money to good use. In 2014, inspectors found enough problems with the bridge that it was inspected every year, and four years later, the city determined that a rusting and detached X-shaped bracing had become a safety risk, according to reporting from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
The city removed the bracing and left steel cables as support in their place. The weight limit on the bridge was reduced from 36 tons to 26 tons.
Maria C. Lehman, American Society of Civil Engineers president-elect and Director of U.S. Infrastructure at GHD, told Roads & Bridges that the cables are a function of the bridge owner looking at the inspection and saying, “What do we do to make it stronger? Because it’s not performing as it should.”
Lehman noted that any kind of a slender steel bridge in the northeast that’s been around for a while sees a lot of weather and salt. She said that bridge owners are supposed to compensate for when you are looking at the inspections as far as what the concerns are.
“When they are doing those inspections, they do low gradings, and that’s how you come up with a posting,” she said. “So all that data has to come forward to understand what happened there.”
Lehman added: “Unfortunately, American infrastructure is not in a midlife crisis. It’s in an old-age crisis. Most of the infrastructure you see out there is serving us well beyond its design life. And it is serving us beyond what it was anticipated to when it was built. When you look at the weights of the trucks and how much weather they were going to take, it’s amazing things are working as well as they are.”
As soon as he learned of the collapse, Councilman O’Connor got in his car and drove to the intersection at the end of the bridge. He saw the people who had been pulled out of the ravine by first responders, and then he looked into the ravine at what was left of the bridge he had traveled over thousands of times.
“The shock was seeing it and just realizing that no one was severely injured,” he said.
About The Author: Jenkins is managing editor of Roads & Bridges.
