At a long-anticipated meeting on Wednesday, the National Transportation Safety Board will vote to determine the cause of the devastating Fern Hollow bridge collapse that raised the alarm about deteriorating infrastructure in Pittsburgh.
Board members are expected to decide whether to adopt the final findings from investigators — who have been examining the failures leading up to the span’s fall since 2022 — and recommend next steps.
The virtual meeting is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. and will be available for the public to livestream.
In the early morning hours of Jan. 28, 2022, the 49-year-old bridge fell 100 feet into a ravine in Frick Park. Five cars and a Port Authority bus — carrying nine people in all — were on the bridge when it caved in.
No one was killed, but several of the victims sustained serious injuries. By coincidence, President Joe Biden was in town that day to talk about his national infrastructure program and visited the collapse site.
The victims are now mounting a case against the city and its contractors to receive compensatory damages and hold officials accountable for failing to maintain the bridge in the years before it collapsed. It’s not clear how the NTSB’s findings could impact the ongoing legal battle.
While NTSB officials have not yet announced the definitive cause of the collapse, they have released detailed findings on the bridge’s condition.
For years, inspectors found that the legs and bracing of the bridge were severely corroded, and “completely severed” in some cases, according to a trove of NTSB records reviewed by the Post-Gazette. The damage compounded every year because water and debris continued to build up and wear down the bridge’s support system.
In transcripts and dozens of emails, inspectors describe a cascade of problems with the span that compounded over more than a decade, and repeated warnings that went ignored by city officials — failures that risked the safety of the estimated 14,000 people who drove across the bridge each day.
City officials told the NTSB in 2022 that they had no routine maintenance program in place to service the bridge, and failed to clean its clogged drainage system for at least three years before it collapsed; they had no records to indicate they had conducted any maintenance earlier, either.
“This bridge had the clogged scuppers the whole time that I can remember,” Tim Pintar, the main inspector on Fern Hollow for years, told NTSB investigators in 2022. “And we kept telling them to clean the thing, clean the thing. Nothing was done.”
Wednesday’s meeting comes as the city contends with the upkeep of aging bridges in nearly every neighborhood — nearly two-dozen are rated in poor condition throughout Pittsburgh — and exorbitant costs to repair the structures.
An executive summary of the NTSB’s investigation is expected to be released in the hours after the meeting, and the full investigation is expected to come out in March.
First Published: February 20, 2024, 7:57 p.m.
Updated: February 21, 2024, 1:26 p.m.