PITTSBURG, Kan. — The railroad crossing where a woman was struck and killed by a train last month may have had malfunctioning crossing arms, according to a spokeswoman for Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway.
The Contra Costa Times reports that BNSF had earlier disputed an assertion from commuters who use the Arcy Lane crossing that the arms were frequently stuck in the lowered position when no train was coming.
Those commuters say the arms were stuck so frequently that they routinely drove around them.
That habit could have contributed to a Pittsburg woman’s false sense of safety when she drove around the lowered arms Sept. 8 and was struck and killed by a train.
Railway spokeswoman Lena Kent said electrical interference or a nearby switching station may have been causing the arms to lower when no train was coming.
“Regardless of what’s causing it, nobody should go around it,” Kent said.
Burlington has since replaced the crossing arm controls with equipment less sensitive to electrical interference.
Commuters use the crossing, which are on private property, to get to work or to the boating docks behind the Dow Chemical building, and they are frustrated that it took so long for the railway to recognize a problem with the arms.
Scott O’Hara of Martinez, who met Mary Mentz, 42, for the first time the day she was killed, wonders if she would have driven around the arms in the afternoon if they had been working correctly that morning, the first time she saw them.
O’Hara said Mentz followed a friend around the arms on the way to the docks. She was on her way to a party on Winter Island, just as he was.
Mentz left the party alone that afternoon, O’Hara said. When she approached the lowered arms again, she called her friends back at the party to ask if she should just drive around them again.
“They said go ahead and go through it,” O’Hara said.
O’Hara said he has noticed the arms lowered in the past, but, like many others, never called to report them.
“I didn’t think hard enough about it,” O’Hara said. “You learn a lesson.”
Since the accident, he’s called police twice to report the lowered arms.
Kent said the railway has received five calls since the accident to an 800 number posted at the crossing and none since Sept. 24, when the crossing control equipment was replaced.
The railway is investigating where the interference is coming from and whether it affected the crossing arms that day, Kent said.
The Pittsburg Police Department has completed its investigation of the crash and does not plan to file criminal charges against the railway, Lt. William Zbacnik said. That the arms may have been triggered by electrical interference or a switching station doesn’t change that, Zbacnik said.
Kent says the problem is that no one called to report trouble with the crossing arms. Though the crossing arms are designed to stay lowered when they malfunction, the railway isn’t automatically notified. It relies on passersby to report problems, using an 800 number posted nearby.
Before the accident, the railway had received only one call this year, in May. It was discovered that a rail car parked on the tracks was triggering the arms to lower. The problem was fixed, Kent said.
Jeff Schletz, who works at Generon and crosses the tracks daily, said he and some of his co-workers didn’t know they were supposed to use the emergency number posted at the crossing to report the lowered arms: They didn’t consider it an emergency.
“It’s not that much of a threat to most people,” Schletz said. “I’ve got to drive through it. You’ve got to get to work.”
A co-worker whose brother-in-law works for Burlington told them about the number to call after the accident, Schletz said.
“He wrote it on the board and he said, ‘Call this number if the gates are down,'” Schletz said. It’s exasperating that this is the method the railway chooses to keep itself informed of problems with the crossing arms, he said.
“We’ve just been putting up with it,” Schletz said. “Generally it does start working again.”
Electrical signals have interfered with Burlington Northern Santa Fe tracks in other parts of the country, but not in California, Kent said.