What. A. Week. Hold my hand like we’re lovers and away we go.
1. The what bridge did what where how now?
It’s a weird feeling to be casually scrolling Twitter in bed early on a school-delay morning to see a random tweet referencing “the bridge that collapsed in Frick Park.” It’s a very “Wait. What?” pause. A pregnant one, if you will. My immediate thought was that a little footbridge fell a few feet into a three-inch deep creek because, you know, bridges don’t just … fall. Right?
RIGHT?
Anakin? Bridges don’t just fall, right?!
Wrong. It was a real bridge with real vehicular traffic on a real route and it went down with a real boom carrying a real PAT double-bendy bus and several very real cars.
That bridge done falled down for real, the writer with the best words wrote. There is no fall left for it to fall. It falled all of the fall available to it.
I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be in a car on a bridge and to suddenly feel that loss of gravity that hits you in the lower pelvis. Like when the Pitfall at Kennywood would let you drop? Imagine feeling that IN YOUR CAR ON A BRIDGE. “It feels like we’re falling, Bob. Are we falling? What did you do, Bob!?” and Bob is watching the sky flying past upwards out his window all, “GLADYS, I DID WHAT THE GPS TOLD ME TO DO. DON’T START.”
The bridge was technically called the Fern Hollow Bridge, which 100 percent sounds like a place that should have a scary legend associated with it. And now it does. (The Legend of Fern Hollow, a new film by M. Night Shyamalan, coming this fall to Tubi TV.)
We can laugh about this because no one was seriously hurt, but we should also talk about how trusting we are in our bridges? The 446 445 in Pittsburgh? The thousand or so more in Allegheny County? The fact that nearly 200 of our bridges are considered to be in poor condition? And we’re just supposed to keep driving our cars over them now that we know bridges do in fact sometimes stop bridging out of the blue?
It all makes me think of the Greenfield Bridge. Do you remember this? The bridge started crumbling, just pooping blocks of concrete onto the Parkway East below where cars avoided the raining concrete chunks like …
Extremely normal. So what they did was they said, this bridge is sick and must be immediately rehabbed. LOL. No. What they did was diaper the bridge in netting to catch the concrete poop for years. There. All better.
When the diapers began filling up too quickly or with too heavy of bridge turds, they finally said, okay, we really need to fix this bridge! It is poop-crying out for help. LOL. No. What they did was they built a whole ass concrete platform under the bridge to give the bridge poop somewhere to land that wasn’t on top of a car. This is akin to instead of diapering your child, you just run around holding a paper plate under him trying to catch poop before it hits your nice clean floor, and then muttering, “This is why we can’t have nice things,” when you miss.
As you know, they eventually completely rebuilt the Greenfield Bridge, so that’s one bridge I’m going to be comfortable crossing for now. The rest? Can we put their ratings at their entrances in big letter grades? So I know if I’m about to cross an A bridge, like the shiny new Greenfield, or if I’m about to scream my way at 90 mph across an “F-minus. Here be certain death for all who dare enter,” like the Rankin Bridge that I swear looked like it was made of rust before they painted over it.
Now, in a great twist of irony (or conspiracy if you’re a nutjob), the day of the bridge collapse was the very same day President Biden was scheduled to be in Pissburgh (h/t New Jersey’s Pennsylvania U.S. Senate candidate, Dr. Oz) to talk …
INFRASTRUCTURE! First he visited the site of the bridge that said it didn’t want to be a bridge anymore, then he went and gave his scheduled infrastructure remarks and amazingly didn’t begin with “I TOLD YOU SO!” In attendance was a sports-shorted John Fetterman who originally said he wasn’t able to make it but I guess when a bridge stops bridging on the day the president is coming to talk about fixing bridges, you show up. (I’m about ten sentences away from becoming a Fern Hollow Bridge truther.)
The bendy bus has been lifted out of the wreckage, but there’s still lots of wreckage of The Bridge that Stopped Bridging to look at and lucky for you …
Your garbage might not get picked up two weeks of every month, and the pothole that ate your tire before burping out your hubcap might go unfilled for half a year, and your road might never meet a salt truck again, but as God as our witness, we will immediately make a road sign to show you where you can park to gawk at the Fern Hollow disaster.
2. Speaking of bridges that say nope
You know me. Something happens and I hit the archives. I must go back into history and find some context. Some genesis. It’s my nature. So I asked myself if any other bridges have ever collapsed in Pittsburgh before and HOLY. SHIT. Let me just run down real quickly here the history of bridge collapses in Pittsburgh and our near surroundings. I omitted bridges that collapsed while they were in the process of being dismantled or built. I omitted boring bridge collapses and that’s a sentence I just wrote. But sometimes bridges would collapse and the press would be like, “A bridge collapsed and sent three cars tumbling. In other news, Mrs. Mary Browning’s pregnant cow is missing.” Finally, I excluded bridges that fell due to flood waters or flowing ice damage. Guess what? All those excluded? Still a hell of a lot of bridges fell down.
March 30, 1913 — A portion of the Sixteenth Street Bridge (at this point still a covered bridge) collapses at 1:00 a.m. It had thankfully been closed a few days earlier due to storm damage.
January 31, 1914 — A fireman riding in a fire engine is killed when a bridge in Beaver Falls … falls, trapping him in the engine cab. Three other firemen escape injury by jumping free and swimming to shore.
July 9, 1918 — A tractor and a brewery truck meet in the middle of the Edgecliffe Bridge over Chartiers Creek in Lower Burrell only to have the bridge crumble under their weight. Only minor injuries are reported.
October 23, 1919 — A bridge over Bull Creek in Tarentum takes a 12-foot plunge with a stone-hauling truck and its occupants. The men, who both survived, reported a crack like the boom of a cannon before the collapse. I bet.
June 19, 1921 — The Greenfield/Sylvan Avenue Bridge connecting Beechwood Boulevard and Schenley Park collapses and falls 150 feet. No one was injured thanks to two pedestrians on the bridge leaping to safety, and three young girls running screaming from it as it collapsed. The bridge had been condemned and was only open to pedestrians, who used it “extensively.” The papers report the collapse occurred “almost without warning” and I just want to say THE CONDEMNATION WAS THE WARNING, YOU GUYS, OKAY?
January 18, 1924 — John T. Richards drives his truck over Herr’s Island Bridge only to be sent down into the icy river with the crumbling bridge. His widow sued the city and won $8,000 due to negligence in the upkeep of the bridge.
November 15, 1925 — the Cokeville Bridge in Derry collapses under a car full of young people who are sent below to icy waters. One girl from Latrobe, age 19, dies. Her family eventually sues for $30,000.
July 29, 1926 — A motorist traverses the Bolivar-West Fairfield bridge in Westmoreland County only to hear the thing crumble down behind him. It was reported as the SECOND bridge to fall in the county just that year. I guess the first one was boring so they didn’t even write about it. I get it.
July 19, 1928 — Just a few hours after the county commissioners condemn it, a bridge in Fayette County on the Point Marion-Geneva Highway collapses and sends 12 boys into the creek below. Two were injured.
July 17, 1928 — the Cow Hollow bridge near Bridgeville (heh) crumbles, sending a steam shovel and truck tumbling and a driver is pinned beneath the wreckage. His legs are amputated to free him, but he dies half an hour later. He was 30. A rescuer at the scene ruins his one and only suit. Allegheny County buys him a new one for $75. No word on what they did about the fact THAT BRIDGES JUST SOMETIMES STOP BEING BRIDGES AND GO…
December 6, 1933 — four are injured when a bridge linking Rankin and Munhall collapses under the weight of two cars and a truck, sending them falling 40 feet. The Pittsburgh Press calls for an overhaul of every bridge in Allegheny County.
March 20, 1936 — in the aftermath of the famed flood, there is no bridge collapse but there is a RUMOR that the Sixteenth Street Bridge has collapsed, sending THOUSANDS of Pittsburghers running toward it to see the damage only to find an intact bridge and crowds so thick there is no way to escape. It takes police a full hour to unsnarl the people jam. Pittsburghers never change. We will rubberneck anything, even a rumor. I bet there was tailgating involved.
April 25, 1957 — An hour before school buses traverse it, a 60-foot steel suspension bridge near Route 22 in Saltsburg collapses, sending a father and son down and leaving the rear end of their car dangling in the water. They escape major injury.
May 1960 — the Robinson Run steel bridge in Collier Township collapses under the weight of a cement truck. No serious injuries are reported.
In 1990, The Post-Gazette says that in all of America, a bridge collapses EVERY OTHER DAY. After 1940, the bridge collapses thankfully did slow down, but here we are in 2022 and it happened again.
The moral of this story is this: In Pittsburgh, always be ready for monkeys and always be ready for the bridge you’re on … to stop bridging.
3. I’ve already seen this movie I think
Do not adjust your eyeballs. That is not the famed PAT bus that got swallowed by a downtown Pittsburgh sinkhole. That is a double-decker bus that got swallowed by a Hong Kong sinkhole (no injuries). The similarities are UNCANNY.
It’s just not very comforting to know that whether you’re in Pittsburgh or a world away in Hong Kong, the earth might eat your bus with you in it.
4. The coyote-dog said, “Let’s blow this popsicle stand”
Remember the coyote-dog or dog-coyote or coyote or dog that was rescued and the local media made us all think a chupacabra or chimera had been captured but really it was just either a mangy dog or a mangy coyote? There’s an update and the update is this:
I’m not lying.
I’m not a veterinarian or anything, but I’m going to say, based on the fact that it Kool-Aid Manned itself through a cage and a screen only after forking all their shit up … it was a coyote.
But I’m honestly like three sentences away from becoming a Wildlife Works Chupacabra truther.
5. Named winter storm Skittles comes for us all
There’s a winter storm coming tomorrow and well …
When it comes to winter storms, it’s never good to be right in the thick of the rainbow of fruit flavors. We might get snow, rain, ice, sleet, freezing rain, graupel, ice spiders … who knows? It’s all on the table.
Hope all the bridges and toilet paper hold up.
6. Before we leave the bridge discourse
This shirt has been sold by Commonwealth Press for years and I highly recommend you snag one before they cross out “ain’t” and replace it with “sure as hell is.”
You can wear it ironically. Not an ad.
7. Let’s end it here! Be kind, get vaxxed, watch out for ice spiders, always be ready for monkeys, and ALWAYS ride your horse as fast as possible over Pittsburgh’s bridges. I will pay the five dollar fine for you if it will save you from a bridgeless bridge.
And as always, if I’ve said something that upset you, here’s the number to call to speak to my manager: