Neglect of Maintenance and a Bridge Collapse

On 28 January 2022 at 6:37 a.m. the Fern Hollow Bridge in Pittsburgh collapsed. No one died, but several people were severely injured. It isn't fair to say that it collapsed without warning, because many years of bridge inspection reports described what was wrong, how it was getting worse, and what should have been done to fix it. Nothing was done.

Neglect? Maybe that should be criminal negligence. Though I doubt anyone who decided that "we have more important stuff to spend money on this year," like parades, and virtue signalling, will be held accountable in this life.

From 2005 onward, recommendations from inspection reports to repair parts of the bridge, didn't fall off the list, they just kept being repeated by each new inspection, year after year. Pittsburgh just didn't fix it.

17 years is a long time to ignore failing infrastructure. Every inspection report starting in 2007 specified the critical structural members of the bridge that were being corroded, and need to be repaired. The reports also called out drainage problems - clogged drain gates. These were also ignored, which accelerated the problems.

This is a good report on the collapse from Practical Engineering. This Bridge Should Have Been Closed Years Before It Collapsed.

Maintaining infrastructure is thankless work. Don’t get me wrong, it can be a really rewarding career. Inspections involve a lot of time out in the field seeing cool structures up close. And repair projects are often interesting challenges for contractors. But they’re not rewarding in the same way that designing and building new stuff can be. No one holds a press conference and cuts a big ribbon at the end of a bridge inspection or structural retrofit. Building a new structure is not just an achievement in its own right; it’s a commitment to take good care of it for its entire design life, and then to rehabilitate, or replace, or even close it when it’s no longer safe for the public.

This is the Practical Engineering video This Bridge Should Have Been Closed Years Before It Collapsed

The NTSB report on the collapse can be found at the following link. Collapse of the Fern Hollow Bridge.

The report includes 3 videos. The 2nd video in the list, is partly an animation of the collapse of the bridge as recreated by the engineering forensics team. If you're interested in such things, it is only 8 minutes. It includes photos of the rusted portions of the bridge from prior years inspection reports.

Rust Never Sleeps is also the name of an album.