ORINDA, Calif. — Bay Area Rapid Transit officials are looking at human error as the most likely cause of Monday’s derailment of a train that injured nine people, a member of the agency’s board of directors said Tuesday.
Debora Allen said interviews of operating staff are continuing, but that the agency has largely ruled out problems with the track or the trainset intolved.
“What we are left with and most of what we know points to human error,” Allen said, according to KGO-TV.
The 9 a.m. derailment on New Year’s Day came after operating staff were unable to use a computer system to align a switch at an interlocking between the Orinda and Lafayette stations. “The fiber optic network went down due to some software issues,” Allen said. That led to the train’s operator manually aligning the switch — a procedure the agency said is not uncommon — just before the derailment.
It was BART’s fourth derailment in 15 years, all in the East Bay, KGO reports.
