The National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday that it plans to hold hearings into the summer’s deadly Metrorail crash.
The hearings, first reported in The Examiner, will run for two days starting on Feb. 23 at the agency’s downtown D.C. conference center.
The NTSB has spent months investigating the June 22 train crash that killed nine and injured dozens more, but it has not formally declared a cause of why a Red Line train slammed into a stopped train outside of the Fort Totten train station. It will likely take months more before the federal investigators issue a final report on the crash.
But the hearing will focus on a number of issues, according to the announcement, “including the adequacy of WMATA’s actions to address safety issues, the adequacy of state safety oversight of rail transit systems — including the Tri-State Oversight Committee– and the adequacy of federal safety oversight of rail transit systems.”
The NTSB does not call for hearings for each case it investigates. It has had five hearings so far this year but voted not to hold one in such high-profile cases as the 2007 Minneapolis bridge collapse.
