Pittsburgh EMS crews practice emergency response on Monongahela Incline

An incident last August, when a dozen riders were trapped because cars on the Monongahela Incline stopped about 150 feet from the station, was a wake-up call for Pittsburgh’s Emergency Medical Services.

No one was injured that evening, and Pittsburgh Regional Transit personnel eventually resolved the issue without riders being evacuated. But that incident reminded EMS that it should resume training exercises on the system that were stopped during the pandemic, said Deputy EMS Chief Mark Pinchalk.

“If we don’t do training and pre-planning, we don’t know what we’re getting into when something happens,” Pinchalk said Wednesday as he watched crew members climb about 50 feet up the tracks to reach a car. 

“How do we get up there? How do we get our [emergency equipment] up? Do we know how to open the doors?”

During the one-hour exercise, four emergency technicians used safety ropes to climb up the tracks, deliver medical supplies and haul a basket to lower a patient.

In most situations, Pinchalk said, first responders will let riders without any medical emergency stay in the car while PRT officials try to get the car moving again. If that is unsuccessful, then they will evacuate them, lowering riders if they are near the bottom and hauling them up if they are closer to the top on Grandview Avenue in Mount Washington.

The agency will do training from 1 to 2 p.m. on Wednesdays through May 22 to familiarize four crews with the incline. Then they will do a full emergency simulation for four hours on June 12.

“We’ll give them a situation and tell them to go,” Pinchalk said.

PRT spokesman Adam Brandolph said the agency encouraged the training after a series of incidents in the past year caused cars to stop and shut the system down for extended periods while the agency tried to determine why that happened. The incidents occurred after the agency finished an $8.2 million project to upgrade the incline’s mechanical and electrical systems and restore stations to the way they looked when they opened in 1870.

An outside consultant is reviewing whether the problems have been caused by the way PRT crews are operating the system or there are other issues with the incline.