(The following article by Karisa King was posted on the San Antonio Express-News website on April 27. Brother Heath Pape was a member of BLET Division 197 in San Antonio, Texas.)
WASHINGTON — By the time Union Pacific engineer Art Cadena took the helm of the train that caused last year’s deadly chlorine spill in Bexar County, he’d already logged a nearly 50-hour workweek, catching sleep between erratic shifts whenever he could.
For Cadena, the exhausting schedule was a routine but dangerous part of life on the rails.
“If you took a poll, most of the people at work are tired,” he told federal investigators probing the cause of the crash on Tuesday. “You work so often and so many different shifts, your body really doesn’t recuperate.”
But what happened inside the yellow engine cab in the minutes before the June 28 derailment remains a mystery. It’s also proving to be a frustrating yet defining point for investigators, who are not expected to release any findings for another six months.
Cadena, the lone survivor at the controls, said the trauma of the incident has blotted out his memory of nearly the entire trip.
The conductor at his side, Heath Pape, died from the chlorine gas from a ruptured tanker that fogged the area, killing two women in their nearby home and inflicting injuries on another nearby resident that led to his death a few months later.
Tuesday’s hearing at the National Transportation Safety Board offered no fresh insight.
Though investigators haven’t said they suspect the men fell asleep in the cab, questions about fatigue and long, unpredictable shifts at Union Pacific dominated the day. The focus of the hearing has been the strongest indication yet of what direction the inquiry is headed.
With no answers from the crew, investigators have been left to make sense of conflicting data taken from the train and nearby equipment.
The data tell this much: Nobody on the train hit the brakes as it went past two yellow lights at 45 mph.
But the data also show that at points along the route, somebody was shifting the engine throttle. And in the last 40 seconds before the train collided with a Burlington Northern Santa Fe train, somebody in the UP locomotive sounded the horn three times, as if it were a friendly hello.
The confusing combination of facts has inspired a range of theories.
Cadena’s attorney, George LeGrand, suggested that faulty signals were to blame. But so far, no evidence has emerged to support the claim.
“It makes no sense whatsoever that those men would blow by those signs,” he said in an interview. “There’s no other explanation.”
Questions from NTSB investigator Eric Sager alluded to another possibility. Sager asked Cadena if he’d ever let a conductor take control of a train.
Cadena paused.
“There’s been some conductors who were going to enter the engineer training program, and during the daylight hours on straight stretches I would let them run the train for a short time,” he said.
Although Pape, 23, planned to study for the engineer’s test and thus fit that bill, Cadena firmly insisted he wouldn’t have allowed Pape to man the train. The winding stretch toward Del Rio was too dangerous, he said.
“It was not an easy territory. There’s a lot of hidden signals,” Cadena said.
In more than an hour of steady testimony, Cadena, said he couldn’t recall coming to work or even the phone call that summoned him to the rail yard.
His only memory of the trip is passing Pape a bottle of water. In the next flash, he remembers feeling the engine shake and finding his foot wedged in the wreckage.
In the six days prior to the wreck, Cadena never started work at the same time twice. He reported to duty at 6:30 p.m., 6 a.m., 2 a.m., midnight and 3 a.m. in the preceding days.
Whatever the cause of the collision, Cadena and Pape’s family want to hold Union Pacific accountable and have sued the railroad giant. The company fired Cadena in October for failing to stop the train.
Stanley Bernstein, also an attorney for Cadena, cautioned that the NTSB focus should not distract from the underlying cause of the deaths. Pape and Cadena both walked away from the crash, he noted. It was the chlorine gas that killed that day.
“In a perfect world, you’re still going to have accidents,” he said. “What you need to do is make sure these materials can’t escape.”
Union Pacific officials defended the company’s safety record, and emphasized they have launched a hiring campaign to ease the strain on workers. Crewmen who tell supervisors that they’re too tired to work are allowed to skip a shift without penalty, said Michael Brazytis, UP’s director of crew management.
U.S. Rep. Charlie Gonzalez, D-San Antonio, said after the hearing that he wasn’t fully satisfied with worker protections at Union Pacific.
“Given the testimony of several panelists today, I am seriously questioning the adequacy of Union Pacific’s efforts to prevent fatigue among its train crews,” he said.
Company officials also said that they have sent workers pamphlets on how to guard against fatigue.
Cadena recalled leafing through one such pamphlet advising crews to get enough rest and go to bed at the same time every night.
“To us, it was something comical,” Cadena said. “Because the things that are in the pamphlet are things we can’t do.”