The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) pulled no punches in its finding as to why Pittsburgh’s Fern Hollow Bridge collapsed in January 2022:
It was a “cascade of failures,” a cluster cluck, if you will, at every level of government – city, state and federal.
Simply put, government did not do its job in maintaining the span for years on end. It’s a finding detailed to a degree before this but now confirmed in full shocking detail.
The primary culprit was a city that did not bother to perform one of the most fundamental maintenance regimens there can be – clean drains (known as scuppers) that draw water away from the structure and prevent premature rusting.
But the NTSB also found woefully substandard contracted inspections by third parties and inadequate oversight by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) and the Federal Highway Administration (FHA).
A “cascade of failures,” indeed.
Lawyers for the injured lament state laws that limit government’s financial liability to compensate those injured in the collapse (no one died).
Said one lawyer to the Tribune-Review:
“If we can’t hold them accountable, they have no incentive and no fear from not complying,” he said. “It creates the perverse incentive that they simply don’t need to take preventative safety as seriously as they otherwise should.”
Perverse indeed.
And if we have become a city, state and country in which we must “incentivize” our public servants to do the right thing, then the cause of self-governance and civil society is lost.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
