Photo by Rolenz.

The second day of the National Transportation Safety Board’s hearings into the January 12th smoke incident near the L’Enfant Plaza Metro station is underway. So, what the hell happened during the first day of hearings? Well, quite a bit, as NTSB documents—6,000 pages of them—that were made pubic yesterday revealed.

For starters, the incident, in which one person died and dozens of others were hospitalized because of smoke inhalation, was “exacerbated by the transit agency’s slow response to the crisis,” the Post reports. That’s just one of the major communication and safety flaws revealed by the NTSB that sheds light as to what caused the electrical arcing incident and the botched response and rescue effort thereafter.

The Metrorail operator heard “yelling, screaming, kicking, and banging” as the train filled with smoke. In his interview with NTSB investigators, James Curley—the Metrorail operator who was operating the Yellow Line train that became stuck in the tunnel as it filled with smoke because of an electrical arcing event—said that “he was repeatedly told to ‘Stand by. Stand by’ while screaming passengers desperate to escape were ‘kicking and banging’ on the doors.

“I was going back and forth with them, saying, ‘Central: Be advised — I got people on the train. They’re saying they can’t breathe, they’re coughing, they’re vomiting. I need to get back to the platform,’” Curley said.

It wasn’t a single event, but a number of systematic, operational, and communication failures that led to the death of 62-year-old Carol Glover and the hospitalization of more than 80 people. The NTSB said that the smoke was caused by the “meltdown of track-based electrical equipment,” but it was the frenzied response by Metro’s Rail Operations Control Center and first responders that made the incident more cataclysmic than it should have been.

Primarily, there was a communications failure between the ROCC, the two trains in and near the L’Enfant Plaza station, and Metro Transit Officers who were on the scene. According to the documents, a second train, train 510, had pulled up to the L’Enfant Plaza station behind Curley’s train, train 302, which was about 800 feet in the tunnel when it encountered a cloud of smoke.

Train 302 stopped and Curley repeatedly asked ROCC for permission to back the train up to the platform to evacuate passengers, but Transit Police had already evacuated the passengers and operator of that train unbeknownst to the ROCC. Thus, thinking the operator of train 510 was still on board, they tried helplessly to get that train to move.

A breakdown of communication between MTP and the ROCC made it impossible for train 510 to move from the platform so that train 302 could return to the station and evacuate. As a result, Curley and the passengers remained in the train for more than 30 minutes as thick, heavy smoke quickly filled the railcars.

The NTSB released this video yesterday, which shows where and when the events occurred. It also shows surveillance footage of smoke entering the Metro station and tunnels.