(Newsday posted the following article by Jennifer Maloney on its website on September 20.)
NEW YORK — “Watch the gap.”
Riding the Long Island Rail Road these days, you can’t miss the message repeated on trains, in stations and on ticket machine screens.
“I must have heard it five times this morning,” Suffolk County MTA board member Mitch Pally said at an LIRR/ Long Island Bus committee meeting Wednesday on his commute from Suffolk County to Manhattan. Railroad officials met to give an update on steps to address dangerously wide platform gaps.
They, along with state and federal officials, are investigating gaps between LIRR trains and platforms after a gap-related death last month and a Newsday investigation that found gaps as wide as 15 inches — twice the railroad’s standard.
Natalie Smead, a Minnesota teenager, was struck and killed by a train on Aug. 5 after she slipped through the gap on to the tracks, crawled underneath the platform to the tracks on the other side and was hit by a train at the Woodside station. And on Sept. 6, Brittany Walker, 4, fell through a gap as she tried to step onto an LIRR train at Penn Station. She was not seriously hurt.
At least 60 LIRR passengers per year have gap-related accidents — the second-highest cause of injury on the rail line, officials said.
LIRR acting president Ray Kenny said: “We’re looking at it in terms of what we can do immediately, what can be done in the short term and what can be done in the long term.”
The railroad’s immediate measures include an aggressive rider education campaign and more alert train crews, he said.