Pittsburgh infrastructure czar gives glowing report on bridge upkeep

Pittsburgh is finally catching up on fixing its ailing bridges.

More than two years after the collapse of the Fern Hollow Bridge exposed dire problems with upkeep of the city’s spans, a new infrastructure commission assured City Council on Wednesday that the kind of basic maintenance needed to prevent a similar disaster was on track.

Patrick Cornell, the city’s chief financial officer and co-chair of the commission, provided the welcome news.

“We are doing work at a rate that is higher than the problems were appearing, and I don’t think we could say that before,” Cornell said. “We are actually starting to dig ourselves out of the backlog.”

That’s thanks, in part, to a new in-house bridge maintenance crew that can conduct necessary maintenance work without having to contract outside of the city’s own workforce.

The city has suffered from years of deferred maintenance on its bridges, which became painfully apparent with the Jan. 28, 2022, collapse of the Fern Hollow Bridge over Frick Park.

For years, inspection reports had noted corrosion, deterioration and poor drainage on the Fern Hollow Bridge, but nothing was done to fix the span’s fundamental problems.

The National Transportation Safety Board pinpointed the city’s poor bridge upkeep as a key reason the bridge fell, hurling five vehicles and a bus into the ravine below and injuring several people.

Cornell’s panel — officially the Commission on Infrastructure Asset Reporting and Investment, which was formed in the wake of the Fern Hollow Bridge collapse — offered its first progress report.

Inspections last year designated 27 bridge problems as priority zero, or requiring urgent repair.

Those are issues that need to be addressed within a week, though officials have previously acknowledged some priority zero bridge repairs have taken months to fix.

All of the priority zero problems that cropped up last year have been resolved, Cornell said.

The city also is catching up on less pressing problems that were identified in inspection reports, he said.

Related:

• ‘Cascade of failures’: NTSB blames Fern Hollow Bridge collapse on city, state, feds

• Pittsburgh’s top engineer pledges better bridge maintenance to avert another disaster
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• 3 Pittsburgh bridges in urgent need of work not addressed for months

“But there’s still more we need to do,” Cornell said. “We need to do more than just eliminate the risks that are identified in inspections. We need to be more proactive.”

The commission will provide recommendations to City Council and Mayor Ed Gainey to help prioritize bridge efforts and other infrastructure needs in the 2025 budget, Cornell said.

While the commission has started with a focus on bridges, it also is working to inventory the condition and maintenance requirements of all city infrastructure, like roads, steps and sidewalks. That will include research regarding the costs for maintenance and repairs, Cornell said.

Council members encouraged Cornell and his co-chair, Darrin Kelly, a local labor leader, to also consider perspectives from people who use public transit, bicycles or other modes of transportation.

Some council members suggested considering how infrastructure could be made more environmentally friendly, how it could be affected by climate change, and how it is cared for by other cities in order to avoid calamities like a bridge collapse.

The commission is still in the early stages of its work, Kelly and Cornell said, and has had only three formal meetings so far.

Several positions on the 21-person board — which includes representatives from the building trades, various city departments and the broader community — are still unfilled.

It took over a year for officials to approve enough board members for the commission to begin conducting business.

The conversation between commission leaders and council members Wednesday was open to the public, but initially had been scheduled as a closed-doors meeting for only council members and staffers.

Legal experts and good government advocates have raised concerns about discussing pressing public issues — like the state of the city’s bridges — in secret sessions.

Council President R. Daniel Lavelle, D-Hill District, on Tuesday told TribLive the decision to make the meeting public was based on the fact closed-doors briefings are permitted under state law for only a one-way flow of information.

Nearly all meetings that include discussion and deliberation are required by the Sunshine Act to be held publicly if they involve a majority of members — though several council members have acknowledged intentionally avoiding a quorum to hold private meetings.