Metro has repeatedly said this week that problems found in track circuits around the system are not of the same magnitude as those found at the site of the June 22 crash.
But the National Transportation Safety Board on Thursday said investigators are still examining the problems, and a spokeswoman criticized the transit agency for saying the glitches were less significant than problems found at the site of the Red Line crash.
“They cannot say these are not the problems at the accident site,” NTSB spokeswoman Bridget Serchak told The Examiner. “We’ll do the comparisons.”
She said investigators haven’t determined what is causing the problems.
Metro has been downplaying the other circuit problems, saying they are just “blips” in which circuits are not performing in “the parameters we want them to be.”
They have compared it with an EKG machine that studies heartbeats. They said they have raised the bar for what is an acceptable reading since the crash, no longer looking only for major problems like heart attacks.
They have compared it with an EKG machine that studies heartbeats. They said they have raised the bar for what is an acceptable reading since the crash, no longer looking only for major problems like heart attacks.
“We have not found anything that resembles the magnitude of the track circuit problem at Fort Totten,” Metro General Manager John Catoe said Tuesday. He reiterated the point Wednesday and Thursday.
Metro has not said how many other circuits have needed adjustment since the crash. Catoe said they are working on an average of two to four each day out of the 3,000 in the system, but that includes regularly scheduled maintenance as well as fixing those with problems.
As a safety precaution, he said, trains are moving at no more than 15 mph in areas showing problems, which will cause slowdowns.
The trains are still visible to the control system in those spots, Catoe said, and the agency maintains radio contact when trains travel through those stretches.
Catoe also said this week that the NTSB would shut down the train system if it wasn’t safe.
But Serchak noted the NTSB doesn’t have that authority: “We have no way of doing that.”
