Photo by Rolenz.
After last week’s fatal Metro smoke incident at L’Enfant Plaza, still more questions than answers have come up.
But in a hearing with the D.C. Council yesterday, Metro Chairman Tom Downs failed to answer any of the numerous questions prompted by Councilmembers, citing that “he was constrained by confidentiality rules of an ongoing federal investigation,” the Post reports.
“I think the language from the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board is absolutely clear,” Downs said in a 40-minute public session with members of the D.C. Council. “It serves everybody’s interest that we don’t prematurely make any judgments.”
But waiting for the NTSB’s full report before making any judgments could be a long while. At a press conference following the L’Enfant Plaza incident, NTSB investigator Mike Flanigon told reporters that it could take as long as six months to a year before a final report is filed.
So far, we know that an “electrical arcing event” on the third rail just past the L’Enfant Plaza platform caused the tunnel, and two trains stuck on the platform, to fill with smoke. As a result one person, 61-year-old Carol Glover, was killed, and more than 80 others were hospitalized.
Among the biggest questions surrounding the incident: Why were D.C. Fire and EMS’s radio communications not working? Why, after D.C. FEMS alerted Metro that there was no radio communication coverage anywhere in the L’Enfant Plaza station on January 8, did they do nothing? And why did it take 44 minutes for Metro to shut off the power to the third rail?
Those unanswered questions, the Post reports, “[caused] several D.C. lawmakers to become agitated over the lack of public disclosure about the still unknown cause of and troubled response to the worst Metro calamity in six year.”
Even when members of the public were kicked out for the “private” part of the session, Councilmember Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3) told the Post that “none of the questions that we asked in the public session were ones that were answered in the private session.”
As a result, Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie (D-Ward 5), who chairs the public safety committee, has scheduled a hearing on February 5 to try and obtain answers about the incident from investigators.
