Pittsburgh police officers recount surreal moments after Fern Hollow Bridge collapse

A week after the Fern Hollow Bridge collapsed into Frick Park, cleanup is underway and plans to rebuild are in motion.

For the Pittsburgh police officers who first arrived at the bridge on Jan. 28, the sights, sounds and overwhelming magnitude of the scene remain crystal clear.

“I don’t think any of us realized it was actually, like, the bridge collapsed,” Officer Becca Franks said.

“Or,” said Officer Jeff LaBella, “the magnitude of what we were going to find whenever we got there.”

What they found, Franks said, “was like a movie.”

The 447-foot span, part of Forbes Avenue, carries more than 14,000 cars per day, according to state records. It’s is a main artery between Pittsburgh’s Oakland and Regent Square neighborhoods.

The sun hadn’t risen yet when Franks, LaBella and officers Tyler Nestler, Ryan Henry and Matthew Salerno arrived at the bridge. Power to the street lights was out, they said, and the scene was pitch black.

“I didn’t realize it collapsed until we came back up to the top after everyone was out from down below,” Franks said. “It didn’t occur to me that the bridge was gone until we came back up to the top.”

The collapse ruptured a gas line, and the sound, Nestler said, was like “standing next to a jet engine.”

“Communication was nearly impossible for all of us,” he said. “We basically had to scream at the top of our lungs in hopes to communicate. We had zero radio traffic down there to let everybody up on the main road know what was going on below.”

Franks said the group had no idea what they might find at the bottom of the ravine. When they got down there, they feared the worst.

“I thought there were going to be casualties for sure,” LaBella said. “I could not even believe that there weren’t any casualties when we got down there. I was expecting the absolute worst.”

The way the bridge fell, Franks said, likely saved lives.

“The bridge really broke in the most perfect way,” she said. “If it broke any other way, I don’t think it would have been the same outcome.”

Nestler said the span split in a way that kept the articulated Port Authority bus from sliding backward into the other vehicles.

“There are times when that traffic’s backed all the way up from Braddock Avenue and there are actually people sitting on that bridge,” LaBella said.

“And that’s a four-lane bridge,” Nestler said. “And especially with Shady Side (Academy Junior School) being very close — like Franks said, there could have been school buses, and it could have been 10 times worse than it ended up being. It was still terrible, but not as bad as it could have been.”