Nearly a year after a deadly Metro train crash brought an obscure safety oversight group into the limelight, the group has its own website
The Tri-State Oversight Committee was virtually unknown when two Red Line trains crashed on June 22, 2009, killing nine people and injuring dozens more. Even Metro’s chairman at the time said he had never heard of the independent group tasked with making sure Metro stayed safe.
TOC did not have an office, a phone number nor a Website. For weeks it could not disclose its annual budget when asked by reporters because it didn’t have a policy on how to release information.
The committee then created a rudimentary page hosted on the District Department of Transportation’s site, which was bolstered over the subsequent months as more attention was turned to the group. Still, the site continued to have problems as recently as last month.
But this week, it graduated to its very own domain: www.tristateoversight.org.
It is part of recent efforts to beef up the committee. Maryland, Virginia and the District had pledged in April to bolster the committee with full-time employees, a bigger budget and a new structure after a Federal Transit Administration audit slammed the committee for being toothless and the transit agency as being “dysfunctional.”
