The National Transportation Safety Board is making an unusual trip Monday to meet with Metro’s board of directors and discuss the federal agency’s findings from last summer’s deadly train crash.
The meeting will bring the two sides together for the first time since the deadly June 22, 2009, Red Line crash pushed the transit agency into the national safety spotlight.
Such a summit is rare for both sides. The Metro board normally does not have sessions in August and called for the special meeting last week. Meanwhile, NTSB staffers say they cannot remember a time when their full board met with another agency outside of their own board meetings.
All five NTSB members are slated to attend Monday’s joint meeting, even though Vice Chairman Christopher Hart had been dispatched to St. Louis on Thursday to help investigate a deadly school bus crash, said spokeswoman Bridget Serchak. It was not clear as of last week, though, whether all of Metro’s 14 board members would attend.
NTSB recommendations to Metro
The National Transportation Safety Board has recommended multiple steps for Metro to take to make the system safer in the wake of last year’s Fort Totten crash, including:
» Stop using the oldest rail cars as soon as possible because they tend to crumple during a crash. Metro’s current system of putting the Rohr 1000 series rail cars in the middle trains, surrounded by newer-model rail cars, was called “ineffective” as an interim step. But Metro’s current plan calls for the rail cars to remain in service until new replacements arrive in 2016.
» Replace nearly half of the track circuits in Metro’s automatic safety system, after a faulty circuit appears to have caused the safety system to fail to see a stopped train, leading another to slam into it during the Fort Totten crash. Metro had previously set aside $30 million over the next three years to address possible NTSB recommendations, but it is not yet clear if the money will cover the costs of replacing the circuits, nor when such work could begin.
Metro and the NTSB have a long history together. The NTSB has investigated many accidents on the transit system that sits in the federal agency’s backyard and shuttles many of its workers to their jobs. The safety board also has three other investigations into Metro still ongoing.
But the transit agency’s board of directors became a particular target of the NTSB in the investigation of what caused the Fort Totten crash, which killed nine and sent 52 to the hospital. The federal safety investigators called Metro’s safety culture “anemic” and said Metro’s board failed to engage in oversight of the system’s safety or even list the terms in its mission.
But the vast majority of Metro’s board has heard such criticism secondhand so far.
Metro board Chairman Peter Benjamin was the only member of the 14-person transit agency board to attend any portion of the NTSB hearings held over three days last February to investigate the crash.
No Metro board member attended the full NTSB meeting July 27 when the independent federal agency unveiled the probable cause of the crash and its recommendations to fix the problems that led to it. Metro Vice Chairwoman Catherine Hudgins attended much of the hearing but left before the final recommendations; Benjamin said he was attending a funeral, and the longest-serving member, Christopher Zimmerman, said he was out of the country.
