It seems the city of Pittsburgh may have had a three year warning before Friday’s dramatic bridge collapse.
In December 2018, Twitter user @gpk320 sent a tweet to @pgh311, which is the city’s response center. The tweet contained a photo of a badly rusted section of the bridge and what appears to be a temporary repair made with cables.
You can take a look at the tweet here:
You can also see that a service request was created a few days later by @Pgh311. It obviously did not do any good.
As you can see in the picture, part of the bridge isn’t just damaged, it is missing entirely. The brace was no longer making contact with the support beam. However, this didn’t seem to be enough to cause any alarm with those responsible for fixing the issue.
The user did say he didn’t think it was a crisis, but obviously, the bridge did not appear to be in great shape. We don’t know what actions were taken by the city before they decided the bridge could continue to operate, but Friday’s disastrous collapse that resulted in 10 people being injured will do doubt spur an investigation.
It could start with the maintenance request ticket created three years ago and marked as “closed” sometime after that.
All of this, ironically, happened the same day President Biden is set to speak in Pittsburgh, PA about his $1 trillion infrastructure package.
We have reached out to multiple people within Pittsburgh’s government, including the city’s 3-1-1 helpline, and no one could be reached for comment at the time of this article’s publication. We will update the story should we receive a response.