On Thursday’s rush hour, three days after the deadly collision of Metro cars that killed nine and injured scores, rails cracked on two other lines.
Transit officials closed a track on the Red Line north of D.C. because of a faulty track; they noticed another bum rail on the Green Line east of the capital in Prince George’s County. Trains were forced to run on single lines, commutes took hours, nerves were frayed.
That’s a mere nuisance to the families and friends mourning the loss of loved ones killed in Tuesday’s crash north of the Fort Totten station in the District. As a community, we have much grieving and mending to do.
But we also have to take a gut check on what went wrong and how to fix it. We don’t want to spend the summer wearing crash pads every time we get on a Metro car, and looking at the car number to make sure it’s not one of the 300 worn-out and paper-thin 1000 Series cars.
Here are two suggestions for sorting through the disaster and moving forward:
» The D.C. Council needs to investigate the paper trail inside Metro.
Five years ago, the National Transportation Safety Board notified Metro that some of its cars were in bad shape. Officials investigated a crash in Shady Grove and a brake failure in Woodley Park. Both involved train cars built in the 1970s. The feds issued an “urgent” warning and advised Metro to upgrade the cars or take them off the tracks.
These cars were “un-crashworthy.” The cars that crumpled and killed this week were the series that Metro had been told to fix or sideline.
What happened to that memo? Who read it? Was it made public? Why not?
Seems to me it falls within the city council’s oversight role to call in Metro officials and follow the trail.
» At the end of the trail there is money, or the lack of it. Metro officials can rightly say they have been short of cash for years. Congress and the federal government talk a great game about the importance of public transportation, but when it comes to forking over millions of dollars to keep trains and buses running well, the federal government is inept.
What’s truly galling about the abandonment of Metro by the government is that many of the riders work for the federal government.
President Barack Obama sits atop the empty rhetoric heap at the moment. He talks up public transportation, but his budget shortchanged Metro.
We were lead to believe our congressional delegation was hardwired into the White House. Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen is assistant to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a protege of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Steny Hoyer of Prince George’s County is majority leader. D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton goes way back with Obama.
Don’t these three have Obama on speed dial?
Perhaps they need to ride Metro once or twice a week; that might encourage them to shake some money from the budget.
