We mourn for nine Washingtonians who perished Monday in a crash of Metro cars. We are learning that the crash should not have happened. We are finding out that our public officials let us down.
Names of riders killed in the wreck were still being made public as I pondered the tragedy and tried to make some sense of it. There were Maj. Gen. David Wherley and his wife, Ann; there was Dennis Hawkins, who worked at a D.C. elementary school; and LaVonda King, who was about to open her own salon. And too many others.
Imagine the horror of Jeanice McMillan, the train operator. She was operating the six-car train that plowed into the rear of a train waiting on the tracks between Fort Totten and Silver Spring. She must have seen the back of the train rushing toward her. The impact of the crash launched her car on top of the waiting train. She was killed.
Did the train’s automatic braking system fail? Did the brakes get triggered but fail to grab? Did McMillan engage the manual brake? Did the manual brakes fail?
More than likely, we will never get the answers. McMillan can’t give us her version of events; and the train was not equipped with the kind of black box that might have provided an explanation.
In fact, McMillan’s train, we have learned, might have had faulty brakes. We have learned that federal officials warned Metro five years ago that 1000-series trains were not safe, had lousy brakes and were “un-crashworthy.”
D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton spoke with National Transportation Safety Board member Debbie Hersman and Metro chief John Catoe on Tuesday and said — with an unfortunate choice of words: “What was striking about my conversations with these two top officials was their agreement that the most seriously damaged car, the striking car, was part of the ‘1000 series’ that had received an NTSB ‘urgent safety recommendation’ for phase-out or retrofitting. . . .”
In plain language, federal officials told Metro these trains were barely fit for passengers in 2004. The feds investigated a crash in Shady Grove in 2004 and another brake failure in Woodley Park a year later and issued an “urgent” warning.
Tragically, we do not have Jeanice McMillan to tell us what happened with the brakes. Here are my questions: What happened to the urgent warning? Who received it? What action did they take?
In our current era of transparency, why didn’t we get the “un-crashworthy” memo? As one of the hundreds of thousands of Metro riders who boarded the 1000-series cars, how come I wasn’t clued in?
Let’s not get sidetracked by the bureaucratic finger-pointing that always follows a tragedy such as this. Yes, Metro did a crummy job of letting the public know of the crash. No, Metro did not tell D.C. fire and rescue squads to come prepared to rescue riders in a major wreck.
Who knew what, when did they know it — and why didn’t they tell us?
