The safety oversight group charged with monitoring Metro says it is concerned about several low-speed collisions that have occurred in the agency’s rail yards in recent months.
The Tri-State Oversight Committee reports that the rail yard crashes “emphasize a problem with rule compliance.”
The transit agency had reported five or six rail yard crashes since December, according to The Washington Post.
No riders were on board during the crashes and no one was seriously, TOC Chairman Matt Bassett told The Washington Examiner, and they typically occurred at low speeds. He said it’s hard to know exactly how much the crashes cost. He said trains had bumped into posts, shop doors or other trains.
Yet he said the committee is not assigning blame to the workers. “This is a relatively minor concern,” he told The Examiner. “We wouldn’t want anyone to take this a major concern.”
The crashes are the latest problem Metro has had with following its own safety policies. Maryland labor safety experts cited the agency in the January 2010 deaths of two workers, saying the agency failed to provide a lookout for the two men. And the National Transportation Safety Board found that Metro wasn’t following safety testing policies for finding faulty train circuits, which ultimately contributed to the deadly June 2009 Fort Totten crash.
But Bassett said the agency has made major progress. “Those right-of-way worker safety violations were very serious and the consequences were public and terrible,” he said. “The compliance problems we are talking about now are not in the same league.”
TOC investigators plan to conduct site visits and evaluations in the next two weeks to deal with the issue, its report said.
“We are addressing rail yard rules compliance to help ensure best safety practices, which includes conducting regular compliance checks in partnership with the Tri-State Oversight Committee,” Metro spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein told The Washington Examiner in an e-mail.
Metro board members plan to discuss the issue and the overall oversight report Thursday.
“While we have made great strides in catching up on a very large backlog of corrective action plans and accident investigations, there is still a good deal of work ahead,” Metro board member Mort Downey said in a written statement. “And the report is a reminder of the importance of staying focused and remaining diligent about safety.”
