Source: Reuters
* At least 9 dead in worst accident ever on D.C. subway
* Subway authorities were warned on safety of older cars
By Andy Sullivan
WASHINGTON, June 23 (Reuters) - Transit authorities in Washington, D.C., had been warned to upgrade older subway cars before a crash on Monday that killed nine people, U.S. investigators said on Tuesday.
Federal officials investigating the crash, the deadliest in the 33-year history of Washington's Metro Area Transit Authority, said a 2006 warning to retire or modernize older subway cars like those involved in the crash went unheeded.
"We recommended to WMATA to either retrofit those cars or phase them out of the fleet. They have not been able to do that and our recommendation was not addressed," National Transportation Safety Board spokeswoman Debbie Hersman said at a news conference at the scene of the accident.
Seventy-six people were taken to hospitals after one train slammed into another that was stopped on above-ground tracks during the afternoon rush hour, Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty said.
A Metro news release later said the figure rose to nine after more bodies were pulled from the wreckage.
The operator of the moving train was among those killed in the crash, which drove one train on top of the other. It remained there on Tuesday morning as workers attempted to clear the wreckage.
Metro said it could take weeks or even months before the cause of the crash was determined.
2004 ACCIDENT
The NTSB, a federal agency, had urged the Metro system to replace older subway cars or upgrade their crashworthiness following a 2004 accident that injured 20 passengers, federal records show.
Metro general manager John Catoe said changes to the rail cars would be made if needed.
"Any car that strikes another vehicle at a certain rate of speed and with a certain amount of weight, you're going to have some major damage," he said.
Metro spokesperson Lisa Farbstein said the car which struck the waiting train was among the oldest on the system and had been in service since Metro opened in 1976.
She added that about 290 of Metro's 1,126 cars were original, and that Metro officials were in the process of soliciting bids for replacements -- although cost was an issue.
"We don't have the money in place to replace them," she said. "We believe that they are safe to have on the rails."
The crash occurred on the heavily traveled Red Line about 5 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT) on a relatively lengthy stretch of track near the city's northeastern border with Maryland, where trains can build up a considerable speed.
Both trains were heading south into the city. The leading train had stopped because it was waiting for another to leave the Fort Totten station, officials said.
It was unclear why the second train had not received the stop signal as well, or why the operator did not manually stop her train when she saw the blocked tracks ahead, officials said.
Passengers on the second train said it did not slow down at all before impact.
"There was no attempt at braking. We just slammed into whatever we slammed into," passenger Theroza Doshi told Reuters.
Washington's Metro system needs more than $7 billion to keep its fleet of trains and buses in good repair through 2020, Catoe told Congress in recent testimony.
It also needs to replace one-third of its rail cars, some of which are more than 30 years old.
The U.S. recession has caused the system to cut its operating budgets this fiscal year by 10 percent.
Last month, it had to tap reserves to help close a funding gap for fiscal year 2010 that at one point was projected to reach $154 million. Despite the problems, rating agency Standard & Poors in April raised the system's credit rating.
(Additional reporting by Lisa Lambert; editing by Paul Simao and Vicki Allen)
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Train in fatal crash had emergency brake on
Investigators also find evidence that the train was in automatic mode, meaning the onboard computer should have slowed it down. Monday's wreck killed nine people.
By Lena H. Sun and Lyndsey Layton
8:16 PM PDT, June 23, 2009
Reporting from Washington -- The operator of the Metro train that slammed into another, stationary train apparently had activated the emergency brake in a failed effort to stop before the deadly collision, federal officials said Tuesday, as they searched for the cause of Monday's wreck that killed nine and injured 80.
Debbie Hersman of the National Transportation Safety Board said the emergency brake was depressed, and the steel rails showed evidence that the brakes were engaged. Investigators also said the moving train had been in automatic mode, which means onboard computers should have controlled its speed and stopped it before it got too close to the stationary train.
In addition, Metro sources said, the first two cars of that train were two months overdue for scheduled maintenance of some braking components.
Taken together, experts say, these facts point to several possible scenarios: The operator activated the brake too late; the computers that are supposed to stop a train from getting too close to another train faltered; the train's brakes failed; or some combination of those. Some passengers on the striking train have said they never felt the train slow down.
A team of NTSB investigators painstakingly searched through the tangled heap of metal on the tracks just north of the Ft. Totten Station in northeast Washington. They were examining the trains, track and signals; the actions of the operator and her downtown supervisors; and the computers that control train movement and are supposed to prevent crashes. Investigators will also look at maintenance work performed this month on the computerized train control system along the stretch of track where the crash took place.
Officials began to remove the train cars Tuesday and plan to experiment with similar trains to determine approximate speed and stopping distance, Hersman said. The crash, the force of which vaulted the rear train atop the other, occurred on a curve where the speed limit is 59 mph, Hersman said.
Today's experiment will also try to determine whether the curve, or anything else, obstructed the operator's view of the stopped train. The operator, Jeanice McMillan, 42, was among those who died in the accident. Investigators will examine her cellphone and text-messaging records, review her work and rest schedule, and analyze blood samples, all standard NTSB procedures.
Investigators are also delving into the automatic train protection system, which is designed to make collisions impossible. Had the system been working correctly, it would have sensed that Train 112 was getting too close to Train 214 and automatically directed the brakes aboard McMillan's Train 112 to engage.
"I truly believe Metro is a safe system," Metro General Manager John B. Catoe Jr. said. Catoe said it was too early to know what caused the crash, but he said there was "no evidence" that the operator was using a cellphone or texting at the time of the crash. After a special board meeting Tuesday, he told reporters, "there's not a letter of evidence" to indicate operator error. And right now, he said, there is also no indication of signal failure.
The six cars that formed Train 112 were among the oldest in Metro's fleet, purchased between 1974 and 1978 from Rohr Industries for the opening of the subway system. They have been rehabilitated and retrofitted "to keep them in good condition," Metro Board Chairman Jim Graham said.
But federal investigators consider the cars unsafe because of a tendency during a crash to collapse into one another like a telescope.
The force of the impact sheared the lead car of Train 112, pushing part of it onto the roof of the trailing car of Train 214, and slamming the rest into the body of Train 214. Two-thirds of Train 112's lead car was crushed, Hersman said.
After a Rohr train telescoped in a 2004 crash, the NTSB recommended that Metro retire the Rohrs or strengthen their frames to prevent collapse. The transit agency refused, saying that the cars made up one-third of the fleet and that Metro could not afford to mothball them before their planned retirement in 2012. The NTSB, which makes safety recommendations but has no enforcement authority, disagreed at the time, calling Metro's stance "unacceptable."
Tuesday, Hersman again questioned the safety of the Rohr cars and blamed Metro for failing to act. "We recommended to [Metro] to either retrofit those cars or phase them out of service," she said. "Those concerns were not addressed."
The cars still make up more than 25% of Metro's fleet.
The NTSB also recommended that Metro install data recorders, similar to the black boxes found in airplanes, in all of its rail cars after the 2004 crash. Although the agency installed recorders in some of its newest cars, the Rohr cars did not have them.
Metro officials also did not install crucial software revisions that would have allowed investigators to determine whether the operator had applied the emergency brakes, and the train's speed during braking, according to a source knowledgeable about the braking systems.
Metro's automated system is built around electronic relays on the trains and along the tracks that allow onboard computers to control speeds and stop trains from getting too close to one another. Over the last decade, Metro has struggled with troublesome relays. The agency tore out all 20,000 trackside relays in 1999 after discovering that a small portion designed to last 70 years were failing after 25.
Sun and Layton write for the Washington Post.
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