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Vol. 82/No. 02 January 15, 2018
(front page)
Amtrak, gov’t seek to cover up bosses’ role in
Wash. derailment
Reuters/Steve Dipaola
Amtrak train on first trip on new tracks spills onto highway in DuPont,
Washington, after derailment Dec. 18. Bosses rushed to put crews on new
bypass without adequate training.
BY EDWIN FRUIT
After Amtrak Cascades train 501 derailed and crashed Dec. 18 as it
traveled over the just completed Point Defiance Bypass on its way from
Seattle to Portland, government officials and railroad bosses began to
try to blame the engineer. Three passengers were killed in the crash and
over 100 injured.
Unnamed government officials rapidly leaked the fact that the train
appeared to be traveling at almost 80 mph in a curve marked for 30 mph.
The headline in the Washington Post blared, “Official: Feds Look at
Whether Train Engineer Was Distracted.” No other possible cause was even
mentioned.
But facts began coming out Dec. 23 that tell another story, a story of
rushed efforts by Amtrak bosses to meet the deadline for the new service
that seemed to make it impossible to be prepared.
“Anyone who points their finger at this engineer in this accident is
making a very bad mistake,” John Hiatt, a former BNSF engineer and
25-year railroad investigator for the Bremseth Law firm in Minnetonka,
Minnesota, told KIRO 7-TV, the CBS affiliate in Seattle. Hiatt lives in
Puyallup, Washington, and had spent the last four or five days talking
with Amtrak and other rail workers in the area.
The problem, he said, was that the rail bosses were in a hurry to meet a
deadline and shorted the training to do so. “Deadlines can’t be the
dictator of how you do things,” Hiatt said. “Safety has to be.”
“All the railroads in the country, including Amtrak, do not require
training like they should,” John Risch, national legislative director of
the SMART Transportation Division, which represents rail operating crew
workers, told the Seattle Times.
All of the engineers who would be working the new bypass were trained at
night. “All of them,” Hiatt said. “When they got off their regular run,
they had to figure out a way to squeeze them some way into this
training, plus be able to keep their other trains running.”
“I’ve heard six people were in the locomotive cab” at a time, Hiatt
said. “They had all of them in there to qualify as a group, so they
would take turns running the locomotive.”
And, he said, they did most of their training not in the front engine,
but in the rear locomotive, at the back of the train.
“Riding a trailing locomotive, in the dark, what’s the benefit?” he
asked. “That’s like learning to drive a car while riding in the trunk.”
Hiatt says that the fact Amtrak started the new service without having
Positive Train Control operating — a system that automatically can slow
or stop trains that are traveling too fast — is part of the problem. The
bypass is fitted with PTC equipment, but it is not yet up and running.
Even though Congress voted in 2008 to mandate all rail bosses to put
Positive Train Control on their tracks by the end of 2015, rail
companies have gotten extensions, saying it’s too expensive.
Rail bosses try and isolate and fire workers who speak out about safety,
Hiatt told the Militant. “What the companies do, if someone reports a
safety problem,” he said, “is to get rid of them at a later date on a
minor infraction, claiming there is no relationship to what the worker
had reported.”
Rail bosses and their government allies go out of their way to try to
pin the blame for any problem on the workers involved. That’s what
Canadian rail bosses and government prosecutors are trying to do in
their frame-up trial taking place now of engineer Tom Harding and
traffic controller Richard Labrie in the derailment, explosion and fire
that destroyed downtown Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, in 2013, killing 47 people.
John Studer contributed to this article.
Related articles:
Bosses push for profits fuels rise in job deaths
Deaths on the job go up for third year in a row
No worker has to die!
Fla. rail worker fights firing after speaking out on safety
‘Unions are important not just for pay, but for safety’
Truckers on strike across Russia face gov’t attacks
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