ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, April 1, 1996 TAG: 9604010076
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
note: above
When a Maryland commuter train smashed into Amtrak's Capitol Limited at Silver Spring, Md., Feb. 16, unleashing a fireball and killing 11 people, the government sprang into action.
Four days after the crash, the Federal Railroad Administration issued this emergency order: From now on, engineers on trains without automatic alarms must drive slower and call to other crew members when warning lights flash past from trackside.
Fast action?
In fact, federal safety officials had urged the railroad agency to require such ``signal calling,'' as early as 1976. They repeatedly lobbied for a system that would have stopped the trains before they hit. And they pleaded for changes that would have saved passengers trapped in the resulting smoke and fire.
Time and again, they were rejected. And the toll has been bloody.
Records show dozens of accidents - including five this year - might have been prevented if safety warnings had been heeded.
``These accidents were waiting to happen because of the inaction by industry and regulators,'' says James Hall, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. ``In the 1980s, there was almost a stone wall thrown up by the [Federal Railroad Administration] to our recommendations.''
It has been a bad year for the nation's railroads. Nineteen wrecks have left 22 dead and at least 230 injured, forced the evacuation of thousands of people and cost more than $70 million. There is a connection among some of the worst crashes: Preliminary investigations found the same problems NTSB officials have warned of for years, sometimes decades.
Over the past 25 years, the railroad agency has rejected one out of four NTSB safety recommendations. This rejection rate - even worse in the 1980s - is among the highest of federal transportation agencies.
At times NTSB suggestions even drew sharp rebukes from the railroad agency.
Following a 1993 head-on crash in Kelso, Wash., that killed five people, the NTSB repeated earlier pleas for an automated system to keep trains apart, suggesting its cost would be offset by gains in efficiency. It is not the government's role, the railroad agency wrote, to ``substitute our judgment for the judgment of senior railroad managers regarding matters within their special expertise and responsibilities as corporate officers.''
Jolene Molitoris, who was appointed head of the Federal Railroad Administration in 1993, distances her agency from its past decisions, but admits the failings of the past.
``February was probably the greatest confluence of tragedy on the rails that has ever been,'' she says. ``You think of all those things: What is the connection. Is there something more we could have done?''
Records indicate the answer is yes.
Six accidents this year involve runaway trains, a problem the NTSB has addressed in 12 separate accident investigations since 1989.
In many of those cases, the safety board asked the railroad agency to require railroads to use a $7,000 backup braking system known as a ``two-way end-of-train device'' already required on Canadian trains. Caboose crewmen once performed the function, but cabooses were eliminated in the 1980s to save money.
NTSB calls for the device took on a greater urgency after Dec. 14, 1994, when a Santa Fe freight lost its brakes coming down the treacherous Cajon Pass in California's San Gabriel Mountains and hit a coal train. Two crewmen were injured in the $4 million wreck.
The railroad agency put off action. Officials cited a pending change in the law that would require use of the device. Although normal regulatory procedure would delay enactment until 1997, railroad agency officials considered the issue settled.
NTSB predictions came true Feb. 1, when a Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight lost its brakes and jumped the tracks 300 yards from the 1994 accident. Two crewmen were killed. A release of toxic chemicals closed Interstate 15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
The freight carried the two-way end-of-train device, but it was not turned on.
NTSB investigators were soon at the sites of two more runaways: a Feb. 14 crash in a St. Paul, Minn., rail yard that injured nine; and a Feb. 21 Southern Pacific derailment in Colorado that killed two.
``It is painful for us, because we're the ones who go out on accidents that were addressed by the recommendations,'' says Robert Lauby, chief of the NTSB's railroad division.
The railroad agency finally listened. On Feb. 6, it issued the emergency order. Unintended irony accompanied the announcement.
``Safety is our first priority,'' Molitoris said at the time, noting the derailment ``points to the need for swift and effective measures.''
The emergency order does not end the immediate risk. While trains traveling Cajon Pass must now use the system, railroads have until this summer to put them on trains traveling other mountainous terrain. The railroads have until the end of 1997 to equip all other trains.
LENGTH: Medium: 96 lines KEYWORDS: FATALITYby CNB