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Fern Hollow Bridge should have been closed years before it collapsed

[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] On January 28, 2022, about an hour before dawn, the four-lane Fern Hollow Bridge in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, collapsed without warning. Five vehicles, including an articulating bus, fell with the bridge, and another car drove o

That’s a pretty commonly-used simplification that usually generates conservative results (since the worst corrosion is rarely located at the most critical part of a structure), but again, that wasn’t the case for the Fern Hollow Bridge, and no one had recognized how important those tie plates really were. On a fair weather day during rush hour, it wouldn’t be uncommon for the eastbound lanes of the bridge to be fully occupied by heavy traffic, and the trail underneath to be populated with dog walkers, families, or even classes on field trips from nearby schools. By pure happenstance, President Biden was set to arrive in Pittsburgh on the very day of the collapse to speak in support of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, so he rearranged his trip to make some remarks at the site.

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