(The following report by Monifa Thomas appeared on the Chicago Sun-Times website on September 12.)
CHICAGO — Federal safety investigators blamed last year’s CTA Blue Line derailment on poor track conditions that grew out of faulty inspections, falsified reports and systemic failures in the transit agency’s management of track maintenance and inspection.
Obvious track defects that should have been included in CTA inspection reports weren’t. And other reports were falsified to show that repairs had been made when they hadn’t been, according to a scathing report issued Tuesday by the National Transportation Safety Board.
One NTSB member compared the checks and balances in the CTA’s track maintenance and oversight to “swiss cheese:” full of holes.
“These conditions were obvious. This was not hard to find. Nobody did anything,” said NTSB member Kitty Higgins, of the factors leading up to the July 11, 2006, incident that injured more than 150 people.
Bob Chipkevich, who heads the NTSB’s office of railroad investigations, said he’d never seen track conditions at an accident scene “anywhere near as bad” as what he found at the CTA.
The NTSB report also found that the emergency response to the derailment was slowed by the CTA control center’s inability to pinpoint the exact location of the train. It took 22 minutes for the first fire truck to arrive at the scene after the train operator called the derailment in to the CTA’s control center.
Complicating the evacuation process were problems with the ventilation system that was supposed to clear smoke from the subway.
The CTA says it is working to fix most of these issues.
Days after the accident, the NTSB determined that the last car of the Blue Line train derailed just west of the Clark and Lake station because of tracks that were out of alignment. Corroded rail ties and fasteners were later found to be the culprits.
Tuesday’s report catalogued a series of missteps, from the CTA track inspectors and their immediate supervisors — who were poorly trained and did not have enough time to conduct twice-weekly inspections — to the Regional Transportation Authority, which was supposed to provide safety oversight for the CTA.
But RTA Executive Director Steve Schlickman said the RTA lacked the enforcement authority to change CTA protocol.
Federal investigators found that 80 percent of the Blue Line inspection records for the months leading up to the accident were missing.
And because CTA track inspectors were also responsible for maintenance, there was a “disincentive” to identify problems that they would have had to fix the next day, NTSB member Robert Sumwalt said at a board meeting in Washington.
‘Made great strides’: Huberman
The CTA has since separated the two departments and beefed up staffing, CTA President Ron Huberman said.
The staffing changes are among $40 million in improvements the CTA says it has made since the accident, along with improving subway signage and lighting, replacing wooden track ties with concrete ones and ordering more comprehensive track testing that would have caught the defects inspectors didn’t.
“I believe we have a ways to go to ensure the CTA is as safe as it can be, but we’ve made great strides,” Huberman said.