It has to be one of the sickest and most despicable public policies we’ve ever heard.
As the Tribune-Review’s Paul Reed Ward reported last week:
“The City of Pittsburgh is blaming everyone but itself for the Fern Hollow Bridge collapse” – including those on the bridge when it crumbled into the 100-foot deep ravine on that cold and snowy January 2022 morning.
“In recent court filings, lawyers for the city have faulted the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, the private engineering firms who conducted annual inspections — even the victims driving across the bridge in 2022 when it failed,” Reed reports.
“What’s more, they’ve proposed using any settlement money for the victims to pay for the city’s future legal costs arising from the collapse,” the Trib notes.
Never mind that it was clear that the City of Pittsburgh did virtually nothing to maintain the span for years, despite being repeatedly warned.
The Trib’s Reed cites lengthy court filings made in February in which “city attorneys have hinted at the defenses they might use at trial, including something called the Open and Obvious Dangers Doctrine,” a legal theory that “suggests the victims should have known the bridge was potentially dangerous when it broke apart before dawn that Jan. 28.
But how were they to know? Had the victims asked to see any such inspection reports beforehand, they would have been denied access on “security” grounds. That’s a fact.
And it was these same warped actors who worked double-overtime to keep such documentation from these very victims after the fact in an attempt to cover their behinds at any cost.
The city legal beagles even went as low as to suggest that a dentist, on his way from Monroeville to his Squirrel Hill practice on that snowy morning, as the Trib reports it, “might have been careless and negligent by not paying attention to the road and failing to operate his brakes ‘in a careful and prudent matter.’”
Shot back the dentist’s attorney: “I guess claiming that he should have had a parachute attached to his car is a bridge too far even for the city solicitor.”
This is government at its absolute worst. It is wretched behavior that should make everyone retch.
It’s horrendous that the City of Pittsburgh allowed its bridges to deteriorate to such a degree, then did little to nothing to fix them.
But this attempt to blame those injured by its clear and absolute dereliction of duty should result in the immediate firings — no matter their numbers and no matter their positions — of those prosecuting such a public policy abomination.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
