Metro's deadliest crash and the culture of secrecy

If you were in Buenos Aires, Argentina, or Ottawa, Canada, at 6:30 pm Monday evening, you may well have already heard about the deadliest accident in Metrorail's history.

But if you were in a Metro station here in the D.C. area, all you heard on the system's public address system was something vague about "a train experiencing mechanical difficulties outside Fort Totten station." In other words, for hours after its deadliest crash ever, Metro kept its riders in the dark about what had happened. Metro has done the same thing for years concerning how it spends its millions of dollars in subsidies from taxpayers.

Secretive cultures tend to produce such closely related phenomena. We may not know for another year why Monday's tragedy happened, but what we do know now is that for years Metro has delayed critically important maintenance, even as it spent exorbitantly on grandiose expansion plans and excessive employee benefits. We also know that Metro neglected safety upgrades recommended by the federal government three years ago to the same model of rail car that performed so poorly in Monday's crash. After a 2004 train crash injured 20 passengers at the Woodley Park station, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recommended crash-worthiness upgrades to Metro's oldest rail cars, its original 1000 Series, to prevent "a catastrophic compromise of the occupant survival space." That Metro failed to make these upgrades may not have caused this week's crash, but it might have made it more deadly.

A mangled 1000 Series car is the one seen stacked atop the train it had hit from behind. Metro officials likely will soon demand more tax dollars to make its system "safer." But what about the billions already paid in fares and taxpayer subsidies? Metro paid six-figure salaries to more than 5 percent of its hourly workforce in 2006. The same year, Metro also paid $70 million in overtime, an average of $41,000 to its 408 best-compensated bus drivers, train operators, mechanics, and the like.

We would publish more up-to-date figures but Metro stopped sharing such data with The Examiner after we exposed the system's compensation practices. Before Monday's disaster, four Metro employees were killed by trains between October 2005 and November 2006, in three separate incidents involving mechanical or human error. Something is terribly wrong within Metro, but it won't get better as long as the accountability that comes with sunlight is kept out.