Structural failures elsewhere spur call for emergency repairs at Westmoreland courthouse

It had been a month since the Fern Hollow Bridge in Pittsburgh’s East End collapsed, and the memory was fresh in the mind of Westmoreland County Public Works Director Greg McCloskey as he gathered his bosses around a conference table to meet with an engineer.

It was at that Feb. 23 meeting where county commissioners were told that waiting to repair ongoing structural damage to the two-level parking garage under the Greensburg courthouse was no longer an option.

“I was shocked to hear what could happen if we let this go,” Commissioner Sean Kertes said. “When you hear an engineer not express a time or date that something could happen, it was a real concern.”

County leaders had long suspected work was needed to make major repairs to the underground parking structure that was built as part of the courthouse renovations in 1978. Concrete slabs had crashed to the ground in 2019, and a $70,000 repair project was undertaken to shore up the structure.

Officials knew those repairs were a temporary fix.

Then, in June 2021, a 12-story beachside condominium tower in Surfside, Fla., collapsed and killed nearly 100 people.

“There were infrastructure problems around the country, and then that building in Miami collapsed and I decided to get another report on the garage,” McCloskey said.

Engineers were called and, in September, took core samples of concrete support posts in the garage. Chemical analysis found more than half of 32 samples contained high levels of chloride, a substance that weakens concrete and likely leaked in with water, salt and other environmental substances from above ground. Those samples came from the bottom of concrete beams and slabs, leaving engineers to theorize that greater levels likely existed higher up in the structure.

McCloskey first saw the engineering report Jan. 12. It called for a major rehabilitation of the parking structure.

“The only reason that the 2019 failures did not start a progressive collapse is that the failed slabs wedged themselves into the adjacent beam/slab elements, which had sufficient capacity to hold them in place,” according to the engineer’s report.

The report did not say whether or when a collapse could occur.

That left county officials with more questions.

Government spending laws require commissioners to seek competitive bids for construction projects, a process that could delay work by up to four months.

Then, the Fern Hollow Bridge crashed down into Frick Park on Jan. 28, bringing a new urgency.

Engineers didn’t believe a collapse at the courthouse was imminent because the concrete structure showed no obvious signs of immediate failure. Officials hoped there was enough time to work through what needed to be done and decide how to do it.

“We had to figure out what to do next. We didn’t even know what to bid,” McCloskey said.

Engineers at that Feb. 23 meeting told commissioners they couldn’t wait much longer. They estimated the price to make the repairs was about $5.6 million and recommended Pittsburgh-based Carl Walker Construction Inc., which specializes in structural repairs and has renovated parking structures throughout the city and region, to put together a proposal.

“My first thought was that we need to fix it immediately. Although this will be a major inconvenience, safety comes first. We cannot wait and have a tragedy occur,” Commissioner Gina Cerilli Thrasher said.

Commissioners met with Carl Walker representatives the next day.

The decision was made to use an emergency resolution to hire the company and begin the work as soon as possible using a portion of the county’s $105 million in American Rescue Program funds it received as part of the federal coronavirus relief effort.

“I was definitely panicked, but we had a small window of time to get prepared,” Kertes said. “We didn’t want to let this go and, since we have this money, it was time we do something about it.”

On Tuesday, commissioners formally declared the garage repairs as an emergency situation and awarded a $7 million contract with the company for the project. The following morning the garage and its more than 170 parking spaces, used by county elected officials, department heads and other high-ranking employees, closed and the courtyard in front of the courthouse was fenced off.

Work crews moved in Thursday to begin a process to shore up the concrete beams, a project that is expected to take about two weeks.

Then crews will begin the laborious task to drill down through the courtyard and into the parking structure to assess the damage and make repairs. Strengthening the support beams to allow for future construction also is part of the project.

Kertes said commissioners briefly discussed installing an addition to the courthouse in place of the courtyard but decided against doing so, at least for now. With strengthened support in place, expansion could be an option in the future, he said.

In all, the project is expected to take about six months. Commissioners said they want to have the repairs completed by October.