In a victory for the victims of the January 2022 Fern Hollow bridge collapse, a judge said he will order city officials and private contractors on Wednesday to release long-shrouded documents that could illuminate what caused the disaster and who is responsible.
The ruling came after a nearly eight-hour hearing on Tuesday, where the city’s and victims' attorneys heard testimony from witnesses in city and state government and jousted over the release of inspection records and internal communications regarding the bridge.
Calling the proceeding “needless” and “bureaucratic,” Allegheny County Common Pleas Court Judge Phil Ignelzi promised to grant subpoenas for the records filed by the victims’ attorneys.
“Today really marked the culmination of a two-year fight for transparency,” said Jason Matzus, an attorney representing the victims.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys are seeking bridge inspection and problem reports from contractors CDM Smith, Michael Baker International and Gannett Fleming Inc., along with emails between city officials, and photos and videos of the bridge in the years before it collapsed.
The city’s attorneys argued state and federal law shield the documents from public disclosure, and that revealing specifics on a bridge’s structural deficiencies can make it vulnerable to attacks by nefarious actors. Redacting the names of inspectors also allows them to be as “forthright as possible” when filing their reports, said city attorney John Doherty.
Lawyers representing the bridge collapse victims said the inspection records — now tightly held by the city — should be available to the public. Their document request casts a sweeping net that covers a slew of organizations because they said they haven’t been told by the city which parties were involved in reviewing the bridge’s condition prior to collapse.
Plaintiffs attorneys and the judge also asked why the city’s concerns about safety were relevant when the bridge has already collapsed.
“Why would the federal government give two doodle-doos whether I release this information?” Judge Ignelzi said.
Time is tight. Peter Giglione, the lawyer representing injured Pittsburgh Regional Transit bus driver Daryl Luciani, said they need the records in the next two months because they only have until Jan. 28 to file complaints — because the statute of limitations is two years — and the unreleased documents will help identify parties to sue.
“What we’ve been trying to do this whole time is to try and figure out who was somehow responsible for this,” Mr. Giglione said.
One of the worst infrastructure disasters in the city’s history, the collapse of the 447-foot-long bridge injured 10 people and stranded seven vehicles on its ruins that spanned a ravine in Frick Park. The bridge fell just hours before President Joe Biden visited Pittsburgh to tout his infrastructure bill, which brings more than $13 billion in federal funding for Pennsylvania roads and bridges over five years.
The Fern Hollow bridge had been rated in “poor” condition for a decade before it crumbled to the ground in January 2022, according to inspection records from the National Bridge Inventory, a federal database.
Victims’ subpoenas for more detailed inspection records are merely a piece of the records sought. In a dramatic move in the final hour of Tuesday’s hearing, Judge Ignelzi ordered city attorney John Doherty to summon city solicitor Krysia Kubiak to answer questions about how quickly the city could turn over documents relating to officials’ correspondence on the bridge collapse and other internal information.
The impromptu discussion over the records took place behind closed doors in the judge's chambers.
Judge Ignelzi has ordered the city’s and victims’ lawyers to assemble a list of keywords that can be used to search the local government’s database of 311 reports and internal communications relating to the Fern Hollow bridge. Attorneys representing both sides will reconvene in the courtroom Wednesday morning to discuss the keywords.
City officials must turn over all records that meet the search terms within two to three weeks, Judge Ignelzi said.
The bridge collapse drew national attention and triggered an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board. In May, investigators asked federal and state officials to review bridge inspection reports and identify possible solutions for similar dilapidated spans.
The Post-Gazette previously reported that almost no progress was made in fixing city-owned bridges in the year after Fern Hollow collapsed.
The goal of this yearslong fight is “to make sure that all of the people who were involved in inspecting the bridge and fixing any problems on the bridge are held accountable,” said Mr. Matzus.
“We’ve been kept in the dark.”
Neena Hagen: nhagen@post-gazette.com
First Published: November 29, 2023, 1:58 a.m.
Updated: November 29, 2023, 5:33 p.m.
