Biden visits Pittsburgh Bridge collapse, Reuters vows more US investment

By Andrea Shalal and Doina Chiacu

PITTSBURGH (Reuters) – President Joe Biden stood in front of the Pittsburgh Bridge, which collapsed just hours before his visit to the city on Friday, and stressed the need for his impetus to rebuild U.S. crumbling infrastructure.

Excited, Biden peered through a ravine over the abyss of the half-century-old Fern Hollow Bridge as Pennsylvania and local officials and emergency personnel examined the damage.

“It’s been amazing that we’ve been so lagging behind in infrastructure for so many years,” the president told them.

An emergency worker described the post-collapse scene as loud as a jet engine. Biden praised the rescue work, pointing out the first responder who arrived at the scene and did not stop until about 30 minutes later.

Lifeguards abducted Fern Hollow at least 150 feet (46 meters) and used ropes to carry people to safety after a snow-covered stretch over the ravine fell around 6 a.m. (1100 GMT), Pittsburgh Fire Chief Darryl Jones said.

“Where they initially helped the firefighters who were here, they even did it like a daisy, they just grabbed people’s hands and pulled them out,” Jones said.

Ten people were slightly injured, four of whom were taken to hospital, city officials said. Jones added that groups were looking for a victim under the bridge.

The event was a notable example of the need to rebuild the nation’s aging bridges, highways and other infrastructure with $ 1 billion in spending bills https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-needing-boost-sign -1-trillion-infrastructure-bill -2021-11-15 Biden’s first year signing was an achievement.

The images of the shot showed the four-lane stretch in three large sections, with several vehicles piled up in the rubble of the road that had fallen to the bottom of the abyss. The tail of a long, red city bus appeared trapped in the rubble.

The huge gas spill caused by the collapse forced several families to evacuate their homes before they could be brought under control, Jones said.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it was sending a team to the site.

Pennsylvania has 3,198 bridges https://www.reuters.com/world/us/collapsed-pittsburgh-bridge-is-one-44000-poor-condition-us-2022-01-28/#:~:text=Like% 20nearly% 2044% 2C000% 20other% 20spans, of% 20Transportation% 202021% 20national% 20inventory is in poor condition, according to the US Department of Transportation.

The collapse came just two weeks after Pennsylvania raised $ 327 million from the U.S. Department of Transportation to repair bridges under the new Biden administration infrastructure law. Part of the money to repair the bridges in Pennsylvania is the third largest allocation in the state, after California and New York.

Biden said he was surprised to learn that Pittsburgh had more bridges than any other city in the world. “And we’ll fix them all,” he said before leaving the site.

ECONOMIC GROWTH JUMPS

Biden, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and rising inflation in recent months, has downgraded its approval rating, a boost on Thursday when the U.S. Department of Commerce reported its fastest-growing U.S. economy https://www.reuters.com/world/ us / us- economy-regained-speed-q4-2021-growth-best-1984-2022-01-27 in 2021 in almost four decades.

Economists say Biden-backed fiscal stimulus, including a $ 1.9 trillion bailout plan that pumped money into stimulus payments to states and homes to alleviate COVID-19, played a big role.

In Pittsburgh, the president visited Mill 19, now a steel mill building that serves as a research and development site, and said he was taking stock of what he had done so far.

“Making America is what built this city, the city of steel,” he said. Pittsburgh understands the consequences of what happens when we “ignore the backbone and don’t invest in ourselves”.

The Democratic president was returning to the site of major events in his first campaign in 2019 and made his first stop after his inauguration. The state is a crucial battleground for Democrats to maintain control of the Senate in the 2022 legislature.

Since his inauguration a year ago, he has called for the creation of 6.4 million jobs and 367,000 jobs in manufacturing, and the passage of the infrastructure bill: a rare victory for the bipartisan in a highly fragmented Congress.

“It takes a federal government that doesn’t provide lip service” to buy the American, he said. “Now we’re starting to see results.”

In recent days, General Motors Co. (NYSE 🙂 has said it will invest $ 7 billion to expand the production of electric vehicles in Michigan and Intel Corp. (NASDAQ 🙂 has said it will invest $ 100,000 billion to build a chip-making complex in Ohio.