“On behalf of the Board of Directors and all Metro employees, I offer my deepest condolences to the family of the passenger who died yesterday following the incident on the Yellow Line,” said chairman Tom Downs of the Washington Metro Area Transit Authority yesterday. “Please know that once the cause of this incident is understood, we are prepared to take the actions needed to prevent this from happening again.”
But WMATA isn’t prepared to prevent this from happening again, and that’s the problem. We know it isn’t prepared because it has had this problem before and didn’t solve it then.
“Smoke poured into Metro subway tunnels again last night,” reported the Washington Post back in 2007. At the time, officials claimed the source of the smoke was “baffling,” but the article provided some clues to the answer. The problem seemed to lay with smoldering fiberglass insulators, which “can last for years if they are in dry areas but only several months if in wet areas.”
By January 2013, if not before, WMATA understood how the process worked. At that time, “when a segment of the Green Line near Anacostia lost power after an insulator supporting the electrified third rail experienced electric arcing, causing several trains to shut down and spewing a cloud of smoke.” Arcing takes place when something conducting electricity gets wet, and after the January 2013 incident WMATA admitted that this happens “about twice a month.”
The Post has an infographic that explains how the process works, but basically, water allows the electricity to short circuit across an insulator, and the electricity heats up causing the fiberglass to smoke. So WMATA has known about this for two years, if not more, and hasn’t “taken the actions needed to prevent this from happening.” Such actions probably mean stopping up any leaks of water into the tunnels, which is no doubt easier said than done.
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“The safety of each and every Metro rider and employee remains our absolute highest priority,” WMATA’s chairman Downs concluded. If that’s true, then why hasn’t WMATA replaced the 1000-series cars that the NTSB said were unsafe, and should be replaced, after the 2009 crash that killed 9 people? Several of these cars were on yesterday’s smoke-filled trains. Part of the answer is that the 7000-series cars, which are supposed to partially replace the 1000-series cars, have been found to have safety problems themselves.
If WMATA is so dedicated to safety, why did it take so long to evacuate passengers from the smoke-filled trains? Some passengers “self-evacuated” while others reported that it took 40 minutes during which “passengers weren’t allowed to leave the train for the one- or two-minute walk back to the platform” before rescuers came to lead them out of the tunnels. WMATA said it would improve evacuation procedures after the January 2013 smoke incident, but it has obviously failed to do so.
Safety may or may not be Metro’s highest priority, but it certainly isn’t the political system’s highest priority. Although WMATA has warned since 2002 that it needs billions of dollars to bring its rail system up to a state of good repair, politicians decided to spend $6.8 billion on expanding the system with a new line that actually reduces the ability of the existing Blue Line to meet rush-hour demand. This misallocation is the predictable result of transportation systems that respond to politics rather than markets.
Aside from the serious maintenance failure, the tragedy exposed another problem with rail transit: most of the rail system is vulnerable to a single failure on one part of the system. The L’Enfant Plaza station where the problem took place is used by every Metro line except the Red Line. Service on the Yellow and Green lines was completely halted for hours. Service on the Blue, Orange, and Silver lines kept operating but didn’t stop at L’Enfant Plaza and no doubt many trains were delayed by the problem. Just a few days before, five out of six lines were shut down due to broken rails. Just one more reason for people not to become rail-transit-dependent.
Update: The Washington Post agrees with the Antiplanner about WMATA’s claimed “culture of safety.” So why does the Post support wasting money on a stupid light-rail project when that money ought to be spent rehabilitating the Metro?
Considering they’ve known about this problem for a decade and they failed to make progress after their 2013 wake-up call, should executives be facing manslaughter charges?
I know, according to one of our most esteemed and wise commentators, we should simply let Metro write it all off as a capital expense. Then everything will be fine!
The technical ignorance at WaPo and (sorry AP) here is astonishing.
“An electric arc is a visible plasma discharge between two electrodes that is caused by electrical current ionizing gasses in the air. Electric arcs occur in nature in the form of lightning.” This simple and accurate explanation is the first result of a Googling “electrical arcing”.
What happened on this subway line was almost certainly a short circuit, with perhaps a small amount of arcing. But the heat sufficient to make insulation, or anything else, smoulder or burn, was almost certainly generated by electricity short circuiting through the material. Just like electricity running through a stove heating element.
An electrical arc through atmospheric gases will cause the gases to heat, and if there is inflammable material near it may cause smouldering. But my money is on a simple short circuit because conducting materials usually burn poorly and arcs usually burn themselves out quickly. The first things burnt out by their proximity to the hot gasses are the conducting materials between which the electricity is jumping to create the arc, thereby increasing the gap to the point where the arc dies.
The maximum arc gap in air for a 750 volt AC current is 0.008 inches, and for a 750 volt DC current is 0.004 inches. The WaPo was too damn ignorant even to know there is a difference between DC and AC. As soon as the gap is greater than either 4/1000 or 8/1000 of an inch, the arc dies. Sometimes the heat of an arc will cause surrounding conducting material to slump, bridge the gap and make a permanent short circuit.
What were the arc gap tolerances built into the system? Did an of object fall or fly into the engineered gaps? A key? A coin? Some metal shavings from the train wheels? Did a conducting part break or bend so as to bridge the gap? perhaps a metal support for the insulating shroud? Does anyone ask questions like this?
The fixes for arcing and short circuit problems have been well known for a hundred years at least. Every light switch in the world has short circuit and arc fault avoidance and protective design. For a subway to fail even once in this manner, much less twice, demonstrates some truly horrible managerial and technical problems.
Sorry to be pedantic, but the level of technical illiteracy in American journalist and management classes is truly horrifying. I gather none of them ever made an arc with two pencils connected to household current and gapped by an inch or so. Too busy studying basket weaving, feminist theory or black studies no doubt.
Praise the good Lord, I drove that day!!!
Sometimes participating in the sense of community that only rail mass transit can provide means putting up with smoke inhalation, smell, bodily fluids, the rudeness of fellow riders, and maybe even death.
“Sometimes participating in the sense of community that only rail mass transit can provide means putting up with smoke inhalation, smell, bodily fluids, the rudeness of fellow riders, and maybe even death.”
True. But to be fair, some of those certainly can be said about driving, too. Although others’ bodily fluids are more easily avoidable when driving. 🙂
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/01/14/metros-a-mess-all-the-more-reason-to-ride-it
“While the loss of a life in Monday’s accident was inexcusable and likely preventable, it’s the first fatality in an incident on Metro since 2009. In that time, nearly 150 people have died in traffic accidents in D.C. And let’s remember that more D.C. residents take transit to work than commute by car.”
Wonder how much bodily fluids had to be mopped up by emergency workers for those 150 people.
If there is a payout from this lawsuit, I wonder where the money will come from?
Washington Post: Metro to face passenger lawsuit after riders were trapped in smoke-filled train