EDITORIAL: The ticking clock of Pennsylvania’s poor bridges
For the people on the Fern Hollow Bridge on Jan. 28, 2022, the unthinkable happened in a heartbeat.
There was a banging sound. There was confusion. Was it a crash? There was a drop. One moment, it was a normal Friday morning, driving in the snowy January weather. The next, a 50-year-old bridge that barely seemed like a bridge broke free and plunged into the ravine below.
The ensuing year has been a study in what can happen over time.
It took a remarkably short time to fund a new bridge with $25.4 million of Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act money. It is amazing how fast that can happen when the president was already coming to town the day of the collapse to tout his infrastructure plan.
It took 11 months from the collapse for traffic to be driving through Frick Park over the new span. It took much less time to construct it.
What hasn’t happened is a final result of the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation into the cause of the failure. On Friday, an update was released with more than 2,000 pages of information. Not surprising, as NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy said in May that the incident would be “put … under a microscope.”
NTSB investigations, the kind of deep dives that come after plane crashes, train derailments and major collisions on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, often take two years or more. They are equal parts engineering crime scene and larger-than-life jigsaw puzzle.
But the timeline that matters is not the one that started when the bridge fell. It’s the one you get working backward from that moment, because despite how it seemed at 6:40 a.m. on that cold morning a year ago, it was not something that happened all at once.
There were years of inspections that showed the bridge’s deterioration. Since 2011, it was rated as poor. Its maximum weight limit was reduced. Just months before the bridge fell, concerns were raised. Yet no one ever saw the collapse bearing down on Fern Hollow with inexorable slowness.
Why? Because it isn’t uncommon. Pennsylvania has 23,202 bridges, according to the Federal Highway Administration. Of those, 3,112 are rated poor. That’s 13% of the state’s roads that travel over water, train tracks, other roads or ravines like Fern Hollow.
Those poor bridges are everywhere; 122 are in Allegheny County and 100 are in Westmoreland County.
All of them are ticking clocks. Could one of them be the next sudden catastrophe that just happens to have a long paper trail of warnings about necessary maintenance and repair?