WASHINGTON — National Transportation Safety Board chair Jennifer Homendy blasted the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority for its “poor safety culture” in a press briefing today (Thursday, Jan. 4) on the final report into the Oct. 12, 2021, derailment of a DC Metrorail train in Arlington, Va., saying the agency’s issues with WMATA include some 125 safety recommendations issued since 1970.
“It’s the same story again and again since 1970,” Homendy said. “In case after case, WMATA struggles to proactively identify safety hazards, including low-probability, high consequence risk. When they do identify risks, they’re not communicated within the organization; mitigations are put in place, but then those mitigations are not monitored or measured for effectiveness. And the hazards themselves aren’t tracked to see if there’s a trend over time and to see if more actions need to be taken.”
Homendy was equally critical of the Federal Transit Administration for failing to enforce safety regulations for rail transit systems, a power she said it gained under 2015’s Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act, or FAST Act, but has not used.
The repeated issues with WMATA are reflected — albeit in more restrained form — in the final report’s call for the transit agency to expand its use of trend analysis to identify and address safety issues, and that the Washington Metrorail Safety Council develop a program to support and monitor WMATA’s actions in this regard.
The cause of the 2021 derailment was a flaw that allowed a wheel to move outward on its axle, an issue identified early in the investigation that led to an NTSB recommendation and FTA advisory for other transit systems to check their equipment [see “DC Metrorail issues spur FTA inspection advisory,” Trains News Wire, Nov. 1, 2021]. It also led Metrorail to sideline its fleet of Kawasaki-built 7000-series railcars to address the flaw — a process that is still continuing [see “DC Metrorail begins wheel replacement …,” News Wire, Dec. 5, 2023].
That out-of-specification wheelset on the fourth car of the eight-car train caused a wheel to leave the rail at a switch, according to the final report. The derailment occurred about 4:49 p.m.; none of the 188 people on board — an operator and 187 passengers — were injured. The NTSB found that the train had derailed and re-railed twice earlier in the day prior to incident near the Rosslyn station in Arlington [see “Metrorail car in Arlington derailment had left tracks twice …,” News Wire, Oct. 19, 2021], and found surveillance video showing both those incidents. (That video is included in this YouTube recording of today’s media briefing on the report’s release.
The agency also found that WMATA’s Office of the Chief Mechanical Officer, Rail, had first observed wheel migration issues on some equipment in 2014, and on the 7000-series cars in March 2017, but the problem had not been added to a “hot issues” list of significant problems because of a low number of occurrences. The issues on the 7000-series cars — discovered while deliveries were still in progress — led WMATA to change the specifications for pressing the wheels onto the axles, Homendy said. But the 66% of the cars that had already been delivered — including the one that derailed in the October 2021 incident — were left in service under the old specification, and wheel migration incidents continued to occur, even on cars operating under the new specification. (Ultimately, the wheel-pressing specification was increased further.)
“Had WMATA conducted a trend analysis to ensure the risk mitigations they put in place were effective, this incident may have been prevented,” Homendy said.
Homendy said issues with the FTA were illustrated in its submission on this incident, which “encourages” transit systems to increase the wheel-press specifications to freight rail standards, as WMATA has done.
“But you don’t need to recommend if you’re FTA,” she said. “You don’t need to encourage it. You need to mandate it. You have the authority to do so, just like we do for every other form of transportation. … So I’m calling on FTA to take immediate action to regulate and enforce public safety on our nation’s rail transit systems. That’s something that we have recommended over and over and over again since the 1970s.”
WMATA, in a statement issued on X, said it “fully supports” the NTSB report and “has issued a fleet defect notice to Kawasaki” regarding the wheel issue and that based on the contract between the two parties, “Kawasaki is responsible to pay all costs to fix this wheelset defect. We are confident that our current Wheelset Replacement program will address this wheelset defect as we work over the next several years to repress all 7000-series wheelsets at a higher press tonnage and increased interference fit.”
Kawasaki, however, responded in its own statement that “any suggestion that Kawasaki should absorb the cost of WMATA’s own failures regarding the wheelsets of the 7000 series trains is not rooted in reality.” The company said it met the design specifications established by WMATA, which “supplied the wheelset design for the 7000 series railcars to match their older railcars and then failed to alert Kawasaki when they increased the mounting pressure for those older railcars after they identified 33 instances of back-to-back failures in 2014 — before the first 7000 series car was even delivered. [Italics in the original statement.] The mismanagement by WMATA under prior leadership, cited in the NTSB’s final report, comes as no surprise to those who have followed the agency.”
Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689, which represents WMATA workers, said it is “troubled by the final report’s conclusions about the railcar’s wheel migration on and off the track that ultimately caused the derailment,” and that the union is committed to working with WMATA and other stakeholders “to address the core roots of the accident and taking steps to prevent future ones.” The union also heralded WMATA’s inclusion of a union representative in the NTSB investigation process as “a great step in the right direction to improve transparency and the Union is hopeful this will be the case moving forward.”
The full report is available here.
— Updated at 2:40 p.m. with comments from NTSB press briefing revisions throughout; updated at 6:10 p.m. with Kawasaki statement.
This is Washington, where a properly collated and bound report is the desired product, not a train moving safely through DC.