Metro needs to inspect, clean, and protect Metrorail station rooms that house equipment that detects when trains are on tracks and helps the system avoid crashes, the agency’s safety oversight body said in a report released Thursday. The report further said that Metro had failed to follow through on inspections after the issue was raised in March.

The report from the Washington Metrorail Safety Commission details a remarkable list of problems in several of the system’s Train Control Rooms, including debris from deteriorating ceilings, standing water around electrical circuitry, failing HVAC systems, and more.

These issues aren’t just unsightly: They have major safety implications. Per the report, dust, debris, and moisture can affect the signals sent from the Automatic Train Control equipment in the Train Control rooms, causing the system which prevents train collisions to potentially misfire. In fact, D.C. has seen this nightmare scenario play out before, in the collision of two Red Line trains outside Fort Totten station in June 2009, which killed nine people and injured 52. The National Transportation Safety Board links the crash to the failure of the train control system due to maintenance problems and managerial culture, calling it “a quintessential organizational accident,” the commission report points out.

In a statement, Metro spokesperson Sherri Ly said the agency shares “the same goal of improvement with the WMSC” and is including repairs in the agency’s capital planning to upgrade its Automatic Train Control system.

“Our Safety Department also is coordinating and overseeing additional inspections across the system with Operations which includes assigning ownership of the rooms and developing a comprehensive inspection regime to assure state of good repair,” Ly says.

By its own policy, Metro is supposed to clean and inspect the train control rooms weekly. But in March, commission inspectors found major problems in the Friendship Heights train control room, including “equipment covered in dust and other debris,” buckets placed under water leaks, and an ineffective attempt to protect the equipment using plastic sheeting.

“The deteriorating ceiling in this room, including exposed rusting rebar and other materials, appeared to be at least one source of this debris,” the report continues.

Worse, the report reads, the problems in the Friendship Heights room had been documented, photographed, and listed for a work order as early as February 2019, when part of the ceiling in the room collapsed.

“The ceiling had not been addressed in spring 2022, three years later,” the report says.

Follow-up inspections of other train control rooms at Franconia-Springfield, King Street, Rosslyn, Pentagon, Farragut West and Waterfront stations showed that the problems the commission found at the Friendship Heights station were systemic, the report’s writers conclude.

Metro fixed most of the problems in the Friendship Heights station — though some longer-term maintenance remains — and promised to inspect, fix problems, and ensure regular cleaning of all 100 train control rooms across the system, according to the report.

The agency did inspect the 57 underground train control rooms, and found extensive issues — 94 safety problems in all, including water damage, dust and debris, poor equipment storage, a crumbling cement beam, and out-of-date fire extinguishers — but stopped short of examining the rest of the train control rooms, until the safety commission asked for the results of the additional inspections in late July.

The safety commission found that these problems were the result of systemic communication and training failures. It compared Metro inspection records to the actual conditions in the train control rooms, and found that some safety issues were not being reported at all – and those that were weren’t always addressed by staff responsible for maintaining the rooms. Many staff were not aware of certain cleaning procedures relating to circuits used in the equipment, the report’s writers found, while others said they were not provided with the proper tools to perform the cleanings to safety standards.

“Some frontline personnel told the WMSC that they had given up on the limited cleaning that they had done in TCRs like the one at Friendship Heights Station because no action was being taken to repair the deficiencies causing dust and debris to build up on the equipment on a continuing basis,” the report notes.

The problems come on the heels of a safety incident over the weekend, where a Red Line train with passengers aboard continued towards a known track fire outside of the Dupont Circle station. The communications problems were compounded by a malfunctioning track circuit, part of Metro’s Automatic Train Control system, Greater Greater Washington reported. The incident was just the latest in an avalanche of safety problems the beleaguered transit agency is dealing with, including the never–ending saga of the 7000-series rail cars, which the agency was forced to take out of service last year after a federal investigation into a derailment.

In the wake of the safety commission’s findings about train control rooms, Metro said it would inspect all of the rooms, beginning August 9. The agency expects to finish the work by mid-September, and it will also inspect similarly important rooms in the system. According to the safety commission’s report, the agency blamed miscommunications between different departments as the source of the neglect of train control rooms, but did not produce evidence to back up the claims.

The commission report summed all of it up as “organizational dysfunction.”

“Metrorail as an organization did not effectively identify and mitigate these hazards,” the report says.