(The following article by Sewell Chan was posted on the New York Times website on December 15.)
NEW YORK — A subway worker responsible for flagging train operators to get them to slow down in a work zone was himself struck and killed by a train in Brooklyn yesterday as other members of his work crew reacted in horror. It was the first fatal accident involving a transit worker this year.
The worker, identified by transit officials as Harold Dozier, 54, was struck at 1:52 p.m. by a Manhattan-bound B train on the express track near the Newkirk Avenue station, in Ditmas Park, they said, and was decapitated.
The cause of the accident was not immediately clear. Mr. Dozier, a Brooklyn resident and a transit employee since 1991, was part of a 10-member maintenance crew that was placing material on the track in preparation for a work project that was to begin today, according to Charles F. Seaton, a spokesman for New York City Transit.
“A supervisor had been on the scene in the morning to set the job up, but maintainers do not work under constant supervision,” Mr. Seaton said. The supervisor was called to a meeting at the transit agency’s headquarters in downtown Brooklyn while the crew finished its work, he said.
Under the agency’s work rules, an employee is responsible for setting up signals to warn oncoming trains about track work and for manually flagging the trains to slow down.
After the crew completed its work, Mr. Dozier and another worker went to retrieve the flags, Mr. Seaton said. The other worker briefly lost sight of Mr. Dozier.
“The employee stated that he had seen Mr. Dozier working on the southbound express track a few minutes before,” Mr. Seaton said. “The next thing he knew, the train on the northbound track had applied its emergency brakes.”
Mr. Dozier was found under the third car of the 10-car train.
Mr. Dozier had a solid employment record, Mr. Seaton said, with no record of problems or complaints. He was paid $66,987 a year for his work as a power-distribution maintainer, a job that required working with the third rail and other electrical equipment.
“He was a gentleman, always polite,” said Anthony R. Utano, an official of the transit union’s power division, which represented Mr. Dozier. “He did his work and was never in trouble. Just an ordinary guy.”
Mr. Dozier was president of the Canarsie Gardens condominium on East 88th Street in Brooklyn, said Ranont Richardson, a neighbor. He lived alone and owned a Jaguar that he kept covered during the week and drove on weekends, Mr. Richardson said.
Mr. Dozier often reminisced about his time in the Navy painting battleships in Norfolk, Va., Mr. Richardson said. He said Mr. Dozier also spoke of the dangers of his job but said that he loved the work.
The tracks where the accident occurred are not far below ground level and are visible from a small pedestrian mall that houses a pizza parlor, two banks, a medical office and a coffee shop.
The other members of the crew, as well as the train operator and conductor, were treated for trauma, the authorities said, and one worker was taken to Kings County Hospital Center.
No passengers were injured, but trains on the B and Q lines were suspended or rerouted for several hours. One passenger, Keisha Desir, 17, said she was traveling from school on the train that struck the worker. “We didn’t feel anything,” she said.
Safety investigators from New York City Transit and from the union, Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union of America, went to the station, but their inquiries had only begun last night.
The accident was the subway system’s first on-the-job death in nearly two years. The last death occurred on Jan. 18, 2003, when a subway conductor leaning out a window in her booth hit her head against a metal fence as an A train left a station in Queens.
The last two track workers to be killed on the job were struck by trains on successive days – Nov. 21 and 22, 2002 – in separate accidents in Manhattan.
While deaths among power-distribution workers are relatively rare, the job carries enormous hazards because of the 600-volt third rail.
“It’s more dangerous than a track worker’s job in some ways, because they face the live third rail,” said a vice president of the union, John Samuelsen.