One Dead, Dozens Injured in Washington (DC) Metro Smoke Incident

[Anderson]

To put it another way, Downs made a bunch of errors but Warrington reminds me of Corridor Capital all too much.

Heh. I see what you mean. But of course Warrington was inheriting the unmitigated disaster bequeathed by Downs. Perhaps Warrington's undue optimism and financial engineering were what was needed to get Amtrak back on track. It's interesting to note that Warrington was working directly under Downs, and promoted into Downs's job, at both NJT and Amtrak.

At Amtrak, Downs managed to generate falling ridership, falling revenue, rising costs, and counterproductive cuts to service... in a period which was actually quite good for every other form of passenger rail in the US. He's also the one who invented the line "glide path to profitability".

Keep in mind that Downs inherited an incredible backlog of deferred maintenance from Claytor (who apparently decided to run a brand new fleet into the ground).

It's not like Claytor inherited a great situation, either. When he came in, Amtrak's CR was under 50% system-wide (we're hovering over 90% right now) and the operating subsidy demand was close to a billion dollars in today's terms. Some of this may have been bad accounting, sure, but the point still stands that Claytor didn't have a lot of room to move.

From what I can tell, Claytor deferred that maintenance because the alternative was even deeper system cuts than we saw under Carter and a very real risk of having the system collapse as politicians lost "their" trains. He made a bunch of moves that were not ideal, but the conditions he was working under also were not ideal.

Honestly, the last time Amtrak had a solid political environment for a long time was probably in the 1970s (which saw Amtrak get the Amfleet I, Amfleet II, and Superliner I orders placed). Since then, equipment supplies in particular and funding in general have been scattershot at best and so you had a string of presidents do everything they could to keep things running in the hopes of getting to a major pot of funding...culminating in the Downs-Warrington meltdown. Of course if you want to talk about irony, considering the smash hit that the Acelas were basically from when they started running...the calculations in the 90s would have been right if Amtrak had been able to simply buy off-the-shelf equipment at the time (instead of the mess of a project that was creating the Acela).

Edit: Back to the topic at hand...

There should probably be a timeframe for going to a tunnel evacuation in a situation like this (i.e. smoke in the tunnel), and I can't see it being "wait an hour". It isn't the fact that they didn't move to evacuate that way...it's that this carried on for most of an hour without resorting to that. I'll agree that there are other things that are "better" options, but if you can't do those in a timely manner and you've got something like the smoke situation going on there really does need to be a point that you pull the plug on those options and start getting people out of there.

 

[jis]

Just imagine what would happen if people were allowed to bumble around in aircraft evacuation. For example, there would have been massive casualties in the Asiana hard landing at SFO. Presence of toxic (or even Oxygen depleted) smoke is what does the killing even in fire situations, and the first thing to do is to get the people out of there as fast as possible.

I am almost certain that this event will cause some serious rethink of this matter. There are similar issues in the New York mainline tunnels. For example, the NJT and LIRR MLV's lower level emergency windows are absolutely useless for evacuation in the under river tunnels, since they are below the level of the catwalk and basically open facing concrete a few inches away. Which means that the entire lower level and some of the upper level will have to be evacuated up/down the stairs and then through the narrow doors. Is there an evacuation procedure in place? I am sure there is copious documentation. Do the actual folks on the ground practice such regularly and have it built into them as second nature? Maybe, maybe not. Does anyone know how long it will take to evacuate a 10 car MLV train? Probably not. Has any simulation or real test been done? Maybe, but none that I am aware of, since such a test would have most likely been reported on.

 

[Ryan]

I'm curious as to what the capacity of the tunnel ventilation system is. Obviously in a full on fire situation you don't want to move massive volumes of air, but in this situation, it would have been nice to crank up the vents and suck all of the smoke away from the tunnels and eject it above ground where it can dissipate.

 

[afigg]

Lastest Washington Post story which provides more details on the incident and the delay in the DC Fire Department going down the tunnel to begin to extract the passengers: Timeline confirms Metro riders’ accounts of wait for rescue on dark, smoke-filled train. Took way too long to get the passengers off of the train.

 

[Devil's Advocate]

Just imagine what would happen if people were allowed to bumble around in aircraft evacuation. For example, there would have been massive casualties in the Asiana hard landing at SFO.

Just imagine if a bumbling recovery driver killed a young girl by driving blindly into a mountain of foam retardant. There would be hell to pay nothing to say. Well, besides a bureaucratic reversal of the coroner's finding. The OZ 214 incident seems to have as much to say about the precision of SFO's emergency response as it does about Asiana. Much of what makes flying safe today is based on actual rules and penalties written in the blood of those who perished in the past. I see no reason to assume train safety would be any different. Hopefully this event will receive enough continuing press to result in actionable changes beyond the publishing of yet another volume of unenforced best practices paperwork.

 

[beautifulplanet]

DC Metro timeline confirms long wait times for rescue from smoke-filled cars

January 15, 2015

By Alan Yuhas

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jan/15/dc-metro-timeline-delay-response-time-smoke-train

Some details not included in the Washington Post story:

At 4.25pm, an hour after smoke was first reported, medics transported the woman who later died to hospital, after at least 20 minutes of CPR on the scene.

NTSB spokesman Peter Knudson told the Guardian it could take a year for the agency to complete its investigation of the incident and the “survival factors” of the city’s response.

 

[Anderson]

Just imagine what would happen if people were allowed to bumble around in aircraft evacuation. For example, there would have been massive casualties in the Asiana hard landing at SFO.

Just imagine if a bumbling recovery driver killed a young girl by driving blindly into a mountain of foam retardant. There would be hell to pay nothing to say. Well, besides a bureaucratic reversal of the coroner's finding. The OZ 214 incident seems to have as much to say about the precision of SFO's emergency response as it does about Asiana. Much of what makes flying safe today is based on actual rules and penalties written in the blood of those who perished in the past. I see no reason to assume train safety would be any different. Hopefully this event will receive enough continuing press to result in actionable changes beyond the publishing of yet another volume of unenforced best practices paperwork.

Yeah, but you'd think that the issues would have been dealt with in the past on this front. It seems like a generalized FUBAR, at least as far as I can tell...and I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for WMATA on this one. That's going to go double if they flubbed their own procedures (which does seem plausible).

 

[Guest]

DC Metro learn from past mistakes? Like this incident in 2013?

WASHINGTON – Two weeks after trains were stranded in a tunnel on the Green Line near Anacostia, Metro admits mistakes were made.

“It’s very troubling when you don’t follow all the protocols that could have alleviated the situation,” says Metro General Manager Richard Sarles.

The incident on Jan. 30 started with an arcing insulator, a part of the third rail that smokes from an errant electrical current.

Track crews and Metro Transit Police went to fix the problem, but they hit an emergency button to shut down all power when a train approached them.

No one in the command center told the officer that the train wouldn’t hit them, and the officer did not adequately notify the command center about hitting the emergency button, Metro Transit Police Chief Michael Taborn says.

“At various times during the incident, rail radio traffic hindered the ability for transportation personnel to communicate effectively,” he says.

From this article: http://wtop.com/news/2013/02/metro-admits-mistakes-on-the-green-line-incident/

 

[afigg]

Preliminary NTSB report on the incident: ​Preliminary Report: WMATA Smoke and Electrical Arcing Accident in Washington, DC. Has photos and basic info on what is known.

I think the major scrutiny is going to be on the response of and questionable coordination of the Metro PD and the DC Fire Department.

 

[Guest]

Why does the movie Cool Hand Luke come to mind?

 

[Anderson]

Honestly, it sounds like Metro does not do a good job of taking into account the fact that after a given amount of time, passengers are going to decide to self-evacuate no matter what the employees ask of them. Communication in general doesn't seem to be a strong suit, either.

 

[Ryan]

Two of many things that WMATA doesn't seem to be very good at these days.

 

[Bob Dylan]

WMATA is about as well administrated as the Washington City Government or the Public School System! In other words, poorly!

 

[Ryan]

Oops.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/ntsb-metro-fans-pushed-smoke-toward-passengers-on-train/2015/02/11/42db65d8-b215-11e4-886b-c22184f27c35_story.html

In its most detailed revelations yet about the Jan. 12 incident, the National Transportation Safety Board outlined a sequence of missteps in which Metro controllers, 11 miles from the scene, activated two sets of giant fans at cross-purposes with devastating consequences.

The two sets of fans, on opposite ends of the train, were both pulling the smoke instead of one set pushing while the other pulled, the NTSB said. As a result, the mass of fumes settled over the stationary train and stayed there.

If the fans had been properly coordinated, creating brisk air circulation, the smoke would have been expelled from the tunnel, the NTSB said.

The mistake occurred because Metro, unlike some transit agencies, “does not have a means to determine the exact location of a source of smoke in their tunnel network,” the NTSB’s acting director, Christopher A. Hart, said in letters made public Wednesday.

In the letters, to Metro and other agencies, Hart also said that two of the six fans involved in the failed ventilation effort did not work.

 

[neroden]

WMATA has developed a reputation for a very poor "corporate culture", particularly in the matter of safety. It may be to the point where everyone needs to be replaced from top to bottom. :-(

Famously, there was a defect in the BART signalling system which made it non-failsafe. BART patched this, and informed WMATA, which is the only other agency which used essentially the same system. *Thirty years later*, WMATA had not fixed the problem and the nasty Red Line crash happened.

 

[Ryan]

They were at that point when they hired Sarles, which is what he was supposed to be doing. Doesn't look like he's been successful.