Fern Bridge Collpase, credit: cnn.com
As we continue to experience harsh winter events every year, the flaws in our infrastructure systems make themselves evident. Every state, county, and city has its own system to deal with winter weather in relation to the area’s infrastructure.
At approximately 6 AM on Friday, January 28th, the Fern Hollow Bridge collapsed in the midst of a snowstorm on the east side of Pittsburgh. As a result, 10 people were injured and four of those people were taken to the hospital. The exact cause of the collapse is unknown at this point, but the event is being investigated actively by the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) and will have a crash reconstruction on the scene trying to gain a better understanding of what exactly happened. The destruction also caused a natural gas line to break, but it was thankfully turned off shortly after. The bridge has already been set to receive about $25m in federal funding to be rebuilt.
This type of event is unfortunately not all that rare in the region, with 12 similar events happening in the Pittsburgh area in the last decade. These events include a pair of train derailments, several landslides, and other bridge structural integrity issues. Ironically, President Joe Biden was actually slated to visit Pittsburgh on that day to discuss infrastructure-related matters, which has been a focus of his presidency thus far. Biden visited the site of the event later the same day and had this to say on the issue: “I’ve been coming to Pittsburgh a long time, and as a former Pennsylvanian I didn’t realize that there are literally more bridges in Pittsburgh than in any other city in the world, we’re going to fix them all.”
Even though this issue is unquestionably horrible, Pittsburgh city council member Corey O’Connor said it was actually fortunate that the collapse happened when it did, when the road was not that busy. Councilman O’Connor said, “If this would have occurred an hour later, this is a road that gets probably about 15,000 cars on it a day, and if it was rush hour, we would be looking at a couple hundred cars down in that valley. We got very, very lucky today, and hopefully those individuals at the hospital recover quickly and they’re home safe in the next couple days.”
As a whole, this unfortunate situation ended up being much less harmful than it possibly could have. Most likely, more events like this will happen around the country as winter continues on for the duration of February and into March. All we can do as a community is ensure our infrastructure is solid and safe to the best of our ability, and also be careful whenever operating any kind of vehicle.
