Pittsburgh's Fern Hollow Bridge collapsed in 2022 despite years of inspection reports flagging corrosion — NTSB found the city never acted on any of them

On January 28, 2022, the Fern Hollow Bridge on Forbes Avenue in Pittsburgh collapsed, sending a transit bus, several cars, and their occupants plunging into the ravine below. Ten people were injured. The NTSB investigation, concluded in February 2024, determined the collapse was caused by corrosion and section loss in a transverse tie plate on the bridge's southwest leg — damage that had been documented in inspection reports for years. The NTSB found that the City of Pittsburgh 'failed to act on repeated maintenance and repair recommendations from inspection reports.' Additionally, PennDOT contractors conducting inspections on behalf of the city failed to identify fracture-critical areas and did not calculate load ratings accurately. The collapse happened the morning President Biden was visiting Pittsburgh to promote his infrastructure bill — a coincidence that turned a local bridge failure into a national symbol of infrastructure neglect. But the real significance is what the NTSB findings reveal about systemic inspection failures. The bridge was inspected regularly on paper, but the inspections were not compliant with federal guidance, missed critical structural elements, and the recommendations that were made were simply ignored by the city. This means the nation's bridge inspection regime — the primary safety mechanism preventing bridge collapses — can produce a false sense of security. A bridge can be 'inspected' and still collapse because the inspection was inadequate or the findings were never acted upon. The structural reason this happens is a disconnect between the entities that inspect, the entities that fund repairs, and the entities that prioritize spending. Pittsburgh's bridge inventory is massive — the city has more bridges than any other U.S. city — and its maintenance budget is chronically insufficient. Inspection recommendations compete with every other municipal spending priority (police, fire, schools, potholes), and there is no federal mechanism to force a city to act on inspection findings. The $25.3 million federal commitment to replace Fern Hollow was reactive, not proactive. Nationally, over 46,000 bridges are structurally deficient, and 63,085 are posted for load restrictions. The average bridge age is 47 years, approaching the 50-year design life. The IIJA allocated $40 billion for bridges, but ASCE warns that without life-cycle maintenance planning, today's 'fair' bridges will slide into 'poor' condition.