PITTSBURGH — Hours before President Joe Biden was to visit Pittsburgh on Friday to tout his infrastructure plan, a bridge with a troubled inspection history collapsed, injuring 10 people and stranding seven vehicles, including a Port Authority bus, on the wrecked structure that spans a ravine in Frick Park.
Three people were rushed to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, and a fourth person – one of two passengers on the bus — was taken to a hospital about two hours later, local officials said.
“We were fortunate,” Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey said, that no one was killed.
Later Friday, after he visited the site of the collapse, Gov. Tom Wolf signed a disaster emergency proclamation for Allegheny County, authorizing state agencies to use all available resources and personnel to manage this emergency situation without being hampered by usually required bidding and contract procedures.
“With the Fern Hollow Bridge seeing more than 14,000 cars daily, it’s critical that we act quickly to reconstruct it so that commerce can continue, and life is not interrupted,” Mr. Wolf said. “This declaration allows us to support the county in getting to work quickly, making funding available, and reducing red tape or other barriers to completion.”
The collapse of the 52-year-old steel rigid frame bridge took place as the city prepared for a visit from Mr. Biden, who took a detour to visit the disaster scene before moving onto his scheduled visit to Hazelwood to push his $1 trillion plan to overhaul the nation's infrastructure — including bridges.
Vehicles were caught in the wreckage, falling with the bridge, and an articulated Port Authority bus was trapped on a slab of the remnants of the span.
In a whirlwind rescue, Fire Chief Darryl Jones said crews rappelled 100 to 150 feet down the steep hillside in order to help pluck the injured people out of the rubble, later earning praise from the president.
"These guys deserve an incredible amount of credit going down here," Mr. Biden said while visiting the scene.
About 6 p.m., Chief Jones said emergency crews were transitioning from the response phase to the recovery phase of the situation by working to remove the five vehicles that fell into the ravine and securing the area.
He said he was confident that no one was trapped under the bridge.
"We called in our Pennsylvania Urban Search and Rescue Strike Team 1 who have the equipment and personnel to go in, drill in various spots of the bridge decking, [and] look inside the void spaces making sure no one was there, and fortunately no one was found," Chief Jones said, adding that police K-9s assisted in the search.
Further detailing the collapse, Chief Jones said the bridge did not fall suddenly, and allowed the vehicles to ride the deck down to the bottom of the ravine. He said he believes that's why the injuries were not more severe.
Some of the commuters who went into the ravine were able to get themselves out of their vehicles, he said.
One resident who lives near the park was startled in bed.
“There was a boom, then a monster sound,” said Melissa Bakth, who said she heard the four-lane bridge collapse, followed by the rushing sound of a gas line that broke. “It was so loud, and it didn’t stop."
In a statement, Port Authority said the bus that became trapped — the 61B Braddock-Swissvale — was headed outbound on the bridge around 6:45 a.m. and had nearly reached the east end of the bridge when it collapsed.
Adam Brandolph, a port authority spokesman, said the bus slid backward at about a 45-degree angle, but it stopped when its rear got caught on part of the rubble. Emergency crews were then able to pull out the driver and the two passengers.
Port Authority initially said the bus driver and the two passengers onboard escaped without injury, but Chief Jones said two of those three people were among the 10 injured.
The collapse also triggered what Chief Jones said was a massive gas leak when a line broke, which emitted a sound like a jet engine, on Forbes near South Dallas Avenue.
Peoples spokesman Barry Kuckovich said crews quickly turned off the gas and isolated the break, but that several nearby families were initially evacuated from their homes. They have since been allowed to return.
Lee Schmidt, the city's acting public safety director, said the investigation into the collapse would involve multiple agencies, including the Pittsburgh Department of Mobility and Infrastructure and the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.
Mr. Schmidt said Frick Park will remain closed until further notice, and a 100-yard area around the site of the collapse that will be monitored by police.
"We please ask everyone to stay away from the scene," Mr. Schmidt said. "We don't want to see anyone get injured or hurt. The hillsides are very steep, the trails are full of snow, and there could be debris and instability that we're not aware of, so we ask the public to stay out."
The removal of the vehicles from the ravine will be a multi-day process, according to city police spokeswoman Cara Cruz.
“A lot of work is going to need to be done,” said Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald.
Mr. Fitzgerald said it could take at least a year for the bridge to be replaced, if all goes well. He credited the snowy morning Friday for keeping people at home later than usual from work and school as the reason why more vehicles weren't on the bridge when it collapsed, and on the trails below.
Inspection history
The collapse came in the wake of troubling inspections dating to 2011 that show the aging span has been rated in poor condition, according to the National Bridge Inventory.
Records from the inventory show that the bridge was consistently found to be in poor shape during inspections from 2011 to 2017, with estimated repairs at $1.5 million.
Mr. Gainey said the bridge was last inspected in September 2021. A statewide report from last year noted the bridge was still in poor condition.
City Councilman Corey O'Connor, whose district includes the bridge, said the city's Department of Mobility and Infrastructure was looking at the September inspection report of the bridge to determine if anything was missed.
"I think we have to as a city moving forward with so many bridges, tunnels, things like that, we have to look at what those inspections mean, get into greater detail," he said. "I know there are state and federal rules and regulations around these bridges. Maybe even at a local level we [need to] bump up our standards so that something like this doesn't happen again."
Mr. O'Connor said work was done on the bridge two years ago, which included the replacement of steel beams under the expanse with a type of bungee cord that held everything together. The bridge was also repaved at that time, he said.
The councilman said he was not aware of any work that had been done on the bridge since the September inspection, and the Department of Mobility and Infrastructure determined that it did not have to be closed at the time.
The bridge, owned by the city of Pittsburgh, was a 497-foot bridge with a three-span steel rigid frame and carried some 14,000 vehicles a day. It was built in the early 1970s by New Castle-based Conn Construction Co. It replaced a previous bridge that had been there since 1901.
Replacing the bridge will likely take close to two years, Mr. O'Connor said. He said the city will have to look at designs, engineering, find funding and put it out to bid.
"You're looking at millions of dollars that right now, I don't know where that would be in the city budget," he said, adding that funding may have to be supplied by the state or federal government.
He noted that the city will have to carefully coordinate the rebuilding of the bridge with PennDOT because of the construction expected to start in 2025 on the Parkway East outside of the Squirrel Hill Tunnels. If the timing isn't just right, he said, those two projects could create significant traffic issues.
Pittsburgh City Council may need to examine the city's standards to close a bridge and make them more strict, Mr. O'Connor said.
"At a local level, having so many bridges that we all cross daily, we need to up our game and figure out what those standards need to be in the future of Pittsburgh," Mr. O'Connor said.
One local resident, Greg Kochanski, a software engineer, said he sent an alert to the city three years ago when he was walking his dog at the bridge and noticed a rusted and detached support.
He snapped a few photos and posted one to his @GPK320 Twitter account, adding the city's 311, non-emergency handle, writing:
"@PGH311 I hope someone is keeping an eye on the underside of the Forbes Avenue bridge over Frick Park? One of the big 'X' beams is rusted entirely through (and, yes, I see the cables, so, it's probably not a crisis)."
The city Tweeted back at him three days later that it had received the message and created a ticket to track his concern that was later closed. But what’s not clear is whether any significant repairs were made.
Mr. Kochanski said the detached beam was later removed, and “after that I kind of figured it was taken care of and I gradually forgot about it."
His tweet, which had just a couple of views and likes before Friday, had over 3,000 within several hours of the collapse. His Tweeted photo was now being linked to news stories across the country.
State records show Allegheny County has the highest number of bridges in the state in poor condition – 176 in all – as well as the highest number of bridges overall. In the county, 8% of 1,186 state bridges are listed in poor condition. Another 20% of 397 of local bridges show a poor rating.
NTSB opens probe
Officials from the National Transportation Safety Board arrived at the scene of the bridge collapse Friday evening with a multidisciplinary team that included structural engineers, material engineers and other experts with more than 150 years of combined experience.
Jennifer Homendy, NTSB chair, said the federal agency will open an inquiry into the bridge collapse because it has a congressional mandate to investigate significant events in all modes of transportation, including transportation infrastructure.
"It's our job to figure out what happened, why it happened and to prevent it from happening again," Ms. Homendy said. "So we'll go through the process of an investigation.
"Our role here will be to document the scene, to collect perishable evidence, to also gather inspection records, maintenance records, and then we'll take that and eventually we'll do some analysis on that information so that in the end we can issue recommendations to improve safety nationally, not just locally," she continued.
That process is expected to take 12 to 18 months, Ms. Homendy said, but it could last longer if there are complications.
Ms. Homendy said the agency would first work to map the scene with the expertise of a crash reconstructionist, who will use a drone.
Then the agency will begin the process of moving parts of the wreckage, according to Dennis Collins, NTSB investigator in charge.
"It's kind of like peeling the layers of an onion to see where things were and where they ended up in the collapse," Mr. Collins said. "Of course, we're looking for indications of where it began."
Mr. Collins said engineers will be looking for signs of stress, fracture and deterioration in the materials that comprised the bridge, such as rust.
"I do want to stress that those are just general [indicators]," he said. "We have no factual information on this collapse."
President’s visit
Through most of the busy morning, local officials remarked about the timing of the bridge collapse with the visit by Mr. Biden, who was to focus on the need for the $1 trillion bill to fund repair and maintenance of the nation’s roads, bridges, and railways.
Mr. Biden stopped at the site of the collapse early Friday afternoon before his visit to Hazelwood. He was joined by a host of local and state politicians, including Mr. Gainey, Mr. Fitzgerald, Mr. Fetterman, Gov. Wolf, U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, U.S. Reps. Conor Lamb and Mike Doyle, and state Sen. Jay Costa.
“This bipartisan infrastructure law is critical to southwestern Pennsylvania and the city of Pittsburgh,” Mr. Gainey said Friday. “We know we have bridges we need to take care of … to discuss why this funding is so important today is significant.”
Mr. Doyle, whose district includes the city of Pittsburgh, said he anticipates the bridge collapse to "disrupt transportation" for months.
The House member added that he's been in touch with the White House, Mr. Gainey and Mr. Fitzgerald "to ask for help and facilitate coordination on rebuilding it."
On Twitter, Mr. Doyle wrote that this is a "tragic example of why the [infrastructure] bill Congress just enacted is needed. We should be constantly investing MORE in our infrastructure so our bridges and other public works don’t reach this point of disrepair."
In an interview Thursday previewing the president's visit to Pittsburgh, Mr. Fitzgerald told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that there are structures in the region built almost a century ago that — without the infrastructure investment — are at risk of failing by the end of the decade.
“With the Fern Hollow Bridge seeing more than 14,000 cars daily, it’s critical that we act quickly to reconstruct it so that commerce can continue, and life is not interrupted,” said Gov. Wolf. “This declaration allows us to support the county in getting to work quickly, making funding available, and reducing red tape or other barriers to completion.”
The proclamation authorizes state agencies to use all available resources and personnel, as necessary, to manage this emergency situation. Time-consuming bidding and contract procedures, as well as other formalities normally prescribed by law, are also waived through the proclamation.
Witness accounts
The bridge crosses over a popular walking trail in Frick Park and an off-leash dog exercise area.
Dog walkers and other neighbors gathered near the scene Friday to gasp together and to shoot photos and videos on their phones.
John Jacobs, of Squirrel Hill, said he walks his two dogs in the park every morning.
“It’s funny Biden’s in town on the infrastructure bill,” Mr. Jacobs said. “What a coincidence.”
Robert Randozzo, the manager of Frick Park Automotive, said he was unlocking the door to the shop — which is located across Braddock Avenue from the bridge — at about 6:30 a.m. when he heard the roar of the gas line that ruptured.
"As I unlocked the front door, the wave of natural gas hit the building," he said. "A heavy, heavy smell."
Mr. Randozzo said he called 911 to report the gas leak, but at that time, he didn't even realize the bridge had collapsed.
He said the shop received a host of calls from customers checking to see if everyone was safe.
Jay Duque-Chavez was working at home in Squirrel Hill on Friday morning when he heard about the collapse and decided to walk down in his tennis shoes through the snow to Frick Park.
“I ride this every day with my 6-year-old daughter to her grandma’s,” Mr. Duque-Chavez said while surveying the wreckage from a nearby hillside. “It’s remarkable — I never imagined this thing would collapse. Now it’s like, the outlook on life around this is going to be different going forward — going over, going underneath. I was driving just yesterday around 8:30, then less than 24 hours, you go back to see this.
“You just never know timing,” he added. “Timing and luck.”
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(Post-Gazette staff writers Joel Jacobs, Anya Litvak and Roberta Zeff contributed to this article.)
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