More than three years after the Fern Hollow Bridge collapse prompted calls to better maintain Pittsburgh’s bridges, more city-owned spans are now rated in “poor” condition than at the time of the disaster.
“At the moment, the [deterioration] is outpacing the work to fix it,” said Kent Harries, a professor of engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. City officials gave another explanation in a recent interview, saying much stricter inspections after the collapse are behind the gloomier numbers.
Mayor Ed Gainey’s term started just three weeks before the Squirrel Hill bridge fell in January 2022, marking one of the biggest infrastructure failures in city history and drawing attention to dozens of other spans in dire need of repairs.
Gainey took up bridge maintenance as a focus, creating a new engineering team, hiring an outside firm to assess the city’s hundreds of bridges and allocating more money to upkeep. “I vowed never to wake up to that situation again,” he has said, recalling the early morning rush to the chasm created by Fern Hollow’s collapse.
More than three years later, it’s hard to pinpoint what the city has achieved for all of Gainey’s attention to the issue. As of last week, there were 25 city-owned bridges with a condition rating of “poor,” compared with the 21 in the aftermath of the Fern Hollow collapse. That’s almost a third of the 80 bridges the city owns.
What’s behind the rise in ‘poor’ bridge conditions
Several factors may help explain the worsening ratings — from stricter inspections to funding shortfalls and limited local control.
“Just because you’re looking, you will naturally unearth more,” said Lisa Frank, the city’s chief operating officer. “It’s like if you take people to the doctor, you’re going to find out people have the flu.”
She said the city paid closer attention to bridge inspection reports following Fern Hollow’s collapse, and further scrutinized the inspectors themselves. “Did they really dig in there with their little hammer and see what knocks off when you bang that thing?”
She said the city dismissed one inspection team, which she declined to identify, because they were “phoning it in.” And the city is no longer working with the inspection team that was faulted in the National Transportation Safety Board’s report on the Fern Hollow collapse. That report laid partial blame on flawed inspections of the span in the years leading up to its demise.
She said the apparent rise in the number of “poor” bridges is a misconception, because the 22 bridges rated “poor” in 2022 “is not a real number” — the real number was actually higher, she said.
Harries, the Pitt bridge expert, said a lack of funding afflicting every part of the country is another reason it’s hard for the city to bring these numbers down.
“There’s not been a significant influx of resources” since the Fern Hollow collapse, Harries said.
Pittsburgh is facing a tightening budget and a shrinking rainy day fund, and receives much of its funding for infrastructure projects from the federal government — two facts that make it hard for city leaders to surge money to bridge upkeep. Harries said even if there were more money, other problems would persist.
“Even if you gave me all the money that was required to fix all 25 bridges, it would still take me a decade or more,” Harries said. “There’s the demand on the construction industry,” a shortage of skilled and other laborers and limited time with favorable weather in the region.
Five of the 25 deficient city-owned bridges are completely closed for safety reasons, including one closure that was announced a week after Gainey’s election loss in May — after a campaign during which Gainey repeatedly claimed the city had fixed all its “failing bridges.”
The Herron Avenue Bridge (connecting Polish Hill with Lawrenceville) joined the Charles Anderson Bridge (a main funnel between Squirrel Hill and Oakland and Downtown) in disuse, with no certain reopening date.
Frank said Gainey was referring to bridges with a technical rating of “failing,” which is worse than “poor,” and said he meant there were no failing bridges still open to the public to drive. The city’s bridges that now have a failing rating are closed to traffic.
On top of strengthening inspections on state-monitored bridges, city administrators said they expanded inspection programs for more than 50 smaller bridges that don’t fall under the state’s purview. Zachary Workman, the city’s acting chief engineer, said there are 39 “poor” rated bridges in the city when those smaller spans are counted along with the 25 deficient state-monitored ones.
Fixing bridges will take years
The city website shows one bridge is currently under construction — the Charles Anderson — and lists four bridge projects completed since the Fern Hollow bridge collapsed. (One of those four was the reconstruction of the Fern Hollow Bridge, which was done using mostly federal resources.)
Workman said the website only counts projects that constituted a total rebuild, and doesn’t take into account many smaller tasks associated with improving bridge ratings.
“Since Fern Hollow, I think we’ve completed maybe in the realm of 50 to 60 work orders with our on-call contractor,” Workman said. “Some of those are as basic as washing … some of those are deeper interventions … and in a few cases, that’s completing a repair to lift a bridge out of poor condition.”
The website lists another 10 projects as “in design,” mostly without definitive start dates.
The Charles Anderson project was estimated to cost about $55 million from start to finish — that’s about 45% of the city’s entire 2025 capital budget, and more than the amount the city budgeted for engineering and construction in 2025.
The 28th Street Bridge is slated for $10 million in repairs, with the money expected to be spent in 2027 and 2028, according to the capital budget. The same page of the budget lists as the reason for the work, “Recent inspections have shown that the bridge is in need of immediate repairs.”
The Herron Avenue Bridge, which was closed in May after failing an inspection, is slated for more than $6 million in repairs. The capital plan drafted last fall has the work scheduled for 2028. Workman said the city will draw from its rapid maintenance funding and staff to get the bridge safe to reopen in the near term, while continuing on the longer-term rehab project.
Harries said “very little is in local hands” when it comes to accelerating bridge work.
“It’s not a matter that [local officials] have resources that they could allocate,” Harries said. “It’s in their hands in that they have to advocate for this.”
He said that despite the growing deficiencies, drivers should generally feel safe, partly because inspections became more rigorous following the Fern Hollow collapse. Inspectors order bridges closed that present an imminent danger, and scrutiny following the collapse led to prompt closure of the Charles Anderson Bridge, he said.
“You will see more bridges closed in the future,” Harries said. “Some of those bridges will not reopen.”
While confident that the city has “turned the corner” on its bridge upkeep, Workman and Frank said there is uncertainty about the potential for setbacks from Washington, D.C., where the Trump administration has sought to slash funding and created headaches for numerous other local government agencies.
“The city is extremely dependent on funding through the [federal] Department of Transportation,” Workman said, noting that all of the Charles Anderson Bridge project’s $52 million came from federal sources. “If there’s strings attached to that money, if grant opportunities get more competitive … that could strain the resources we have.”
While Workman said city projects use American-made steel, shielding them from the direct impact of Trump’s new tariffs, the president’s policies could increase demand for American materials, potentially delaying deliveries and construction.
Charlie Wolfson is Pittsburgh Public Source’s local government reporter. He can be reached at charlie@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Femi Horrall.
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