Washington-Area Metro Crash: at least 6 fatalities, probably more

[PonyPotato]

NTSB takes reins of Metro crash inquiry - baltimoresun.com

With the National Transportation Safety Board taking over the investigation of Monday's fatal crash of two trains on the Washington Metro's Red Line, the federal investigation agency and the capital's transit system will open a new chapter in a long and contentious relationship.

For more than a quarter-century, the NTSB has been a persistent critic of the management and operations of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Administration - the regional agency that operates the subway system.

In report after report following both fatal and nonfatal crashes, the NTSB has criticized the agency for papering over safety problems, ignoring warnings from front-line managers, disregarding agency recommendations and failing to learn from its mistakes. Before Monday's crash, there had been at least four fatal incidents killing seven people - three passengers and four transit administration employees - in Metro's history.

After a 1982 crash that killed three passengers in a tunnel near the Smithsonian Institution, the NTSB found that it resulted from mistakes by a driver and supervisors who were poorly trained and ill-equipped to perform their jobs. The board blamed the management's "failure to put into place an adequate program of initial and recurrent training."

In 1996, after a collision that killed a transit administration operator at the Shady Grove Metro station, Metro officials quickly pinned the blame on the dead driver and a low-level supervisor.

After an investigation, however, the NTSB found that the primary cause was the system's "incompetence and arrogance" in failing to follow its own safety recommendations.

The board also recommended that Metro reinforce its rail cars' structure to prevent "telescoping" during a crash. But the transit system, which is not required to follow the NTSB's advice, spent the next eight years protesting that strengthening the cars would be too expensive.

Then, in 2004, a runaway train with only an operator aboard rolled into an occupied train at the Woodley Park metro station near the National Zoo. Twenty passengers were injured when the car that took the brunt of the impact telescoped into itself.

At the time, the NTSB member at the scene of the crash said half of the "survivable space" in the crash was lost.

That member was Deborah A.P. Hersman, who reported to the scene of Monday's crash as the agency's on-scene spokeswoman.

After the 2004 crash, the NTSB issued an emergency directive taking transit officials to task for failing to train their operators adequately. The agency said the system never anticipated an accident in which a train would roll backward.

The Metro system was back under the NTSB's scrutiny after two incidents in 2006 that left three employees dead. In May of that year, a Red Line train struck and killed a mechanic who had been working on the automatic train control system at Dupont Circle. That November, a Yellow Line train fatally struck two track inspectors in Alexandria, Va.

Last year, the NTSB determined that Metro procedures did not require train operators to run their trains by hand or at slower speeds when workers were in the area. It found that transit system rules permitted workers on the tracks to ask that trains slow down but determined that train controllers discouraged such requests and that workers consequently seldom made such requests.

Hersman said Monday night that the NTSB had assigned nine investigators along with support personnel to the latest collision, the worst in the Metro's history, with at least six fatalities. She said the board would be assisted by other federal agencies, including the FBI's incident response team and the Transportation Security Administration.

Full NTSB investigations can take years to complete, but the agency often decides to issue preliminary findings and recommendations much sooner than that.

Transit administration and the NTSB are working together on the accident investigation, said Metro general manager John Catoe. He added that it was "very rare" for a fatal mass transit accident to occur.

Catoe wouldn't speculate on any kind of a cause. He said there was no indication of foul play.

Baltimore Sun reporter Andrea F. Siegel contributed to this article.

I'm glad my boss stopped riding the red line a few weeks ago, after the train proved to add too much time to his morning commute.

What do you think about this? The push for expanding public transportation is something I support, but reading about all of the problems encountered just because of WMATA's lack of attention to safety and training is somewhat terrifying and discouraging when it comes to expanding public transportation across the US.

I am sure that the number of fatalities from car accidents in the DC area is higher than the number of fatalities resulting from public transportation crashes/accidents, but there's something about a large-scale wreck with many fatalities that is just terrifying to me.

What's your take? What would you like to see happen from here?

[The_Jazz]

According to a link on Drudge, the toll is up to 9. Just keeps getting better and better, eh?

The thing that worries me is that THIS SHOULDN'T HAVE HAPPENED. The CTA here in Chicago runs the same kind of software that's supposed to keep this exact scenario from happening. The software knows where the trains are in relationship to one another and keeps them a minimum distance apart (200 feet here if I remember right). We had an accident about 6 or 7 years ago here where one Brown Line train rear ended another one on elevated tracks and derailed both. In a city where an El car has fallen off the tracks downtown in living memory (I know someone who was in a different car on the same train), that's a pretty big deal. As I understand it, there have to be multiple failures, human, computer and mechanical, to happen.

In places like DC and Chicago (add New York and Boston to that list too), light rail is just the most convenient way to get around the city. In Chicago, a blog called The CTA Tattler basically had a little addendum to their regular post wishing all the DC victims well but making no other note. And I think that's how most regular riders not in DC will feel about it, even though there seems to be a very real possibility that it could happen here.

[ASU2003]

It's much easier to cover this one event then cover the 100 or so people who died in motor vehicle accidents yesterday.

Then again, how did this happen? I rode on the red line a few months ago and I thought there were no problems.

[The_Jazz]

Its sounding like there was a brake malfunction. The lead car of the trailing train (as I understand it) was 2 months late for brake maintenance. There may also have been some operator error, but that's still very theoretical. A lack of brakes would pretty much negate the software AND a fully attentive driver if they were going too fast on a curve.

[PonyPotato]

Jazz, thanks for making that update before I did.

[little_tippler]

I'm really sorry to hear this. I imagine the Washington metro is far more complex than the Lisbon one, but I have never heard of anything like this here. The worst we get is people falling on the line (some are suicides). And it's not very common. This is appalling. Definitely need to go over security procedures and staff training it seems.