By Monifa Thomas, Lisa Donovan, Fran Spielman and Art Golab
Chicago Sun Times
Copyright 2006 Chicago Sun-Times, Inc.
CTA and city officials praised it as a quick, well-coordinated response. But passengers and at least one safety expert said Tuesday’s derailment of a Blue Line subway train raised questions about the Chicago Transit Authority’s safety procedures and the city’s ability to respond to an emergency.
When the outbound CTA Blue Line train derailed just west of the Clark and Lake subway station during the afternoon rush hour, some passengers said they were left to find their own way through the smoky, dark tunnel to safety because they didn’t hear any announcements from the train’s motorman.
Instead of using the train’s PA system, the motorman went car to car with a flashlight, instructing passengers to head to an emergency exit 400 feet away from the front of the train — a move CTA President Frank Kruesi praised.
But the motorman didn’t make it to every train car, including the eighth and last car, which caught fire after both sets of wheels jumped the tracks.
“Perhaps the front of the train was helped,” said passenger John Scholl, who was in the seventh car. “But the only time we heard directions was ’40 more feet’ from a firefighter.”
Eighth-car passenger Om Goel, a civil engineer from Naperville, said it was 30 minutes before he saw Chicago firefighters, flashlights in hand, waving passengers toward a spiral staircase leading up to the street.
Goel blames the CTA for not giving a clear exit plan.
“It’s a lack of responsibility as far as I’m concerned,” said Goel, who is considering filing a lawsuit.
On Wednesday, as L service returned to normal, at least three riders did sue the CTA, claiming the agency was negligent in maintaining and properly operating its system.
Investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board on Wednesday interviewed the motorman — who was hired by the CTA last year, and whose second day working the Blue Line was Tuesday — hoping to determine the cause of the derailment. The train does not have an event recorder, as newer models do.
The head of the CTA’s rail union said it was unlikely human error was to blame because of the way the train derailed.
“If he had run over a switch or something he shouldn’t have, the incident probably would have happened in the first car,” not the eighth, said Rick Harris, president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 308. For that same reason, excessive speed probably also wasn’t a factor, Harris said.
The motorman was believed to be traveling 20 to 30 mph around the curve where the derailment occurred.
PA SYSTEM CRITICIZED
That more of the approximately 1,000 passengers on the train weren’t injured is a testament to the quick thinking of the CTA motorman and the fast response of city emergency officials, Mayor Daley told reporters Wednesday at a City Hall news conference. More than 150 riders were hospitalized following the incident, while several dozen others refused treatment. Two people remained in critical condition at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
But criticism touched not only on the response, but on communication.
The train has a battery-operated PA system in each car that the motorman could have accessed, but didn’t, after he asked that power be cut to the line. Kruesi said the motorman would have lost precious time unlocking the cab where the PA is kept and turning it on. Kruesi would not say how long it would have taken to do this.
“If he had gone back to his PA, he would have been in a situation he would not have been evacuating the train,” Kruesi said. “The bottom line is, everybody got out.”
Emergency dispatchers received the first calls at 5:09 p.m. Tuesday, two minutes after the motorman called in a problem to the CTA’s control center.
Eighty-two fire engines and ambulances responded, along with more than 100 firefighters and 52 police units to help passengers coming up from an emergency exit at Fulton and Clinton.
Chicago Fire Department spokesman Larry Langford acknowledged that the initial response to the CTA derailment was hampered by conflicting cell phone calls about the location of the incident.
Five ambulances were dispatched to La Salle and Lake. Several more were sent to Milwaukee and Grand. Neither location was the site of the CTA derailment.
“We were responding to several locations at the same time. We went where cell phone callers said there was activity. We went to Fulton and Clinton as one of the locations given. Units were on the scene there very quickly. As we determined that the other locations did not need fire equipment, those units were redirected to Fulton and Clinton,” he said.
Langford said traffic on fire radio was heavy. But it was nothing like the mass confusion at a Loop high-rise fire in October 2003 that killed six people trapped in smoke-filled stairwells that locked behind them.
“It was not chaotic. It wasn’t confused. It was just heavy. You’re talking to several people on the same frequency at incidents relatively close together. You’re gonna have a lot of radio traffic,” he said.
Some emergency calls came from within the subway tunnel, said the city’s chief emergency officer, Cortez Trotter. Since last week, U.S. Cellular customers have been able to use their phones underground as part of a partnership with the CTA.
Kruesi also dismissed suggestions that having a conductor on board the train, in addition to the motorman, would have made the evacuation smoother.
The CTA has not had conductors on its trains since the 1990s, when they were phased out to cut costs.
Robert Paaswell, director of the Transportation Research Center at City College of New York and former executive director of the CTA, said having one operator “saves money in the long run, but in an emergency it’s not enough to really evacuate a train.”
“To just send people off on their own in a dark tunnel is probably not the wisest thing to do,” Paaswell added.
Paaswell said the motorman perhaps could have delegated someone to stand in the doorway or on the platform to tell people where to go.
Harris said the motorman “did the best job he could do, but you’re asking a lot when you’re talking about eight cars full of people.”
Paaswell and the NTSB said many transit systems have one-person operations, and in some cities, trains are completely automated.
ELECTRICAL FIRE
On Wednesday, the smell of smoke still permeated the tunnel and could be detected by riders on Blue Line trains.
The CTA, which several weeks ago conducted a drill with firefighters simulating such an incident, by Wednesday morning had installed 10 feet of new third rail, through which electricity pulses to power L trains, and repaired 100 feet of running rail.
On Tuesday, Kruesi couldn’t rule out that an overheated braking system sparked the blaze or that the last car hit the third rail when it jumped the tracks, causing an electrical arc.
The NTSB indicated Wednesday that the fire appeared to be electrical in nature.
Some riders heard there might have been debris on the tracks, but the NTSB said that apparently was not the case.
The motorman told NTSB investigators Wednesday that he felt a “jerk” before he halted the train.
“He described it as a sort of tugging,” said NTSB spokesman Terry Williams. “He knew that something was wrong.”