Submitted by David Anderson.
Why does it take a disaster to discover dereliction of duty?
Perhaps because we “live in a pond inhabited by large sharks”, meekly having subscribed to our subservient role as obedient customers in a world of corporate giants and government greed.
Photo by Christina Klas of the pre-refurbished track through Tillicum“The Ethics Gap” by Joseph W. Cotchett with Stephen P. Pizzo, is subtitled “Greed and the Casino Society, The Erosion of Ethics in Our Professions, Business and Government.” The book is dedicated to the small fish in the shark-invested pool who happen to believe the richest and most powerful giants too often “have lost their compass and become servants of greed.”
These giants do not always initially appear however, as fee-fi-fo-fum ogres who smell the blood of an Englishman – or blood in the water – but more as those described by Orwell, their ‘words falling upon the facts like soft snow, blurring their outlines and covering up all the details’ (John Pilger’s introduction to “Tell Me No Lies.”)
Until the train goes off the rails.
As the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in Washington, D.C. continues to investigate the December 18, 2017 Amtrak Cascades derailment just south of our community of Tillicum, Washington, a horrific crash of a train on its inaugural run that made international news as it took three lives and injured 62 others, some of what we’re now learning, according to a July 10 article by Mike Lindblom in The Seattle Times:
Didn’t see the sign, going too fast. The engineer of the train traveling at 80 mph on a 30-mph curve, “tried in vain to see a speed-limit sign – a small amber, diagonal sign, some two miles before the curve.”
Hadn’t been that way but once. The engineer had made only “one southbound training run in the new corridor between Lakewood and Nisqually.”
Unfamiliar locomotive. The engineer “told investigators about a last-minute change in locomotives.”
“The NTSB speculated his peripheral vision was hindered within the unfamiliar locomotive.”
Brakes weren’t used. “Event-recorder data say emergency brakes weren’t applied before the December crash.”
Crowded cab. Michael DeCataldo, vice president of Amtrak operations, “admitted that as many as seven people rode in the front cab last year during night practice trips, exceeding Amtrak standards, in the Lakewood-Nisqually area.”
No alarms. “The board mentioned the lack of ‘cab signals,’ that trigger an alarm if a speeding train passes trackside detectors.”
Safety deadlines postponed. Positive Train Control (PTC) – lifesaving technology – had been required by Congress in be in place by the end of 2015 but as of the derailment in December of 2017 that had not been done.
Safety sacrificed to collect money? “To fully collect federal stimulus money, construction had to be completed by mid-2017,” leading The Seattle Times to their headline: “Officials pushed ‘aggressive’ timeline before safety technology was ready.”
The new PTC deadline is December 31, 2018 but WSDOT predicts “Amtrak Cascades trains to return to the Lakewood/JBLM/DuPont bypass this fall, ahead of the federal deadline.”
And “for occasions the positive train control system doesn’t work,” WSDOT says “trains would still need special operating rules.”
Like knowing the route? Having traveled it more than once?
It was last December, three days after the derailment, according to The Seattle Times, that Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) officials said they “want to have renewed conversations with communities along the route.”
Tillicum is a community along that route and was promised to be kept “on the list of people to contact” when WSDOT had answers to the questions that nearly a year ago “they were not ready yet to answer.”
Answers only now we are beginning to learn.
I’m not a person who is “sue happy” like our Attorney General of Washington State is, BUT, if I was on that train and lived to see the outcome. I would sue the pants off of Amtrak, the NTSB, WSDOT, the conductors who were in charge of the train, and anything that had to do with building that track like it’s designed with that horrible curve. Sorry, but this could had been avoided if they would had taken the time for many inaugaural runs, proper signs and proper safety in mind.
And all the above entities besides WA state had nothing to do with that curve design. It was WA state and Sound Transit who signed off on leaving the curve intact. So the WA AG can just go ahead and sue his own state.
Amtrak’s engineer made a very real human error. Just like many people do everyday driving a car. And just like a motor vechile erroe can, the results were tragic.
You sound as if you are excusing the engineer for his “very real human error.” But what you are failing to acknowledge is the fact that, when you drive a vehicle for living (taxi, courier, etc.) you are held accountable to a higher level than the average citizen traveling down the highway. True, the engineer did not receive the proper, nor adequate amount of, training. But, when the lives of other people are under your control, you have the obligation to ensure you are properly trained before taking on the responsibility. The engineer should have refused to make the run until he was comfortable with both the amount and quality of his training. While I admit and agree that he is not solely responsible for the incident (due to the facts, I refuse to call it an “accident”), his choice to command the train makes him liable for a measure of the blame, regardless of how much of a “real human” he might be.