Posted on 09/14/2008 8:57:03 AM PDT by traumer
LOS ANGELES - In a surprisingly swift assessment, the operators of the commuter train involved in the head-on crash that killed at least 25 people blamed its engineer for the horrific accident. ADVERTISEMENT
However, a National Transportation Safety Board member cautioned that it was too early to establish the cause of Friday's accident. Others, too, questioned the timing of the operator's move to affix culpability.
Rescuers were still sifting through the twisted wreckage Saturday when Metrolink announced — 19 hours after the crash — that its preliminary investigation determined the engineer failed to heed a red signal light, leading to the collision with a Union Pacific freight train.
The engineer was among the dead, the NTSB said. His name has not been released. A total of 135 people were injured.
A visibly distraught Metrolink spokeswoman, Denise Tyrrell, said the company was stepping ahead of the NTSB in suggesting a cause of the accident because "we want to have an honest dialogue with our community." She said internal investigators had reviewed dispatcher recordings and operation of the trackside signal system.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
I guess that they are going to say that in this world of technology, I came down to human error?
Is that what the news media is worried about? Probably trying to protect their union buddies.
Suicide by rail?
While it may indeed be the fault of the engineer, it seems pretty convenient for the “authorities” to assign blame to a dead guy. After all, the dead guy can’t be sued but the rail authority can be.
Apparently there is video taken from the locomotive that shows the crash, along with “black boxes” from both trains. From what I’ve read elsewhere there is little doubt that the transit driver ignored a red light for some reason and put him on the same track as an oncoming freight train.
The “why” this all happened is in question, and the NTSB won’t attempt to answer that for a while.
Maybe the train engineer was colorblind and couldn’t tell the difference between “red” and “green.” Happens all the time here in Florida ... ;-)
I heard that they are floating the rumor that the responsible person was texting which distracted from his performance. It has the sound of an urban myth being created to serve someone’s agenda.
Isn’t it always PILOT error!
Fox is reporting rumors that the engineer was “texting” on his cell phone.....the proof will be there if he was.
a radio station out here claimed that the engineer was texting his girlfriend.....I have no idea if that’s accurate.
The article stressed, however, that this very same claim surfaced after a Boston train wreck and that one had been disproved.
One would think they could use similar electronics to prevent the train from running a red signal.
Always blame it on the dead guy.
“After all, the dead guy can’t be sued but the rail authority can be.”
If the dead guy was the employee of the rail authority, it makes no legal difference for civil suits. The rail authority is responsible, just like Exxon was responsible for employing the drunken tanker captain.
Many rail systems have some mechanism to force a train to stop on a red signal. Primitive technology was one cause of this disaster.
> Fox is reporting rumors that the engineer was “texting” on
> his cell phone.....the proof will be there if he was.
There were rumors of that in the recent trolley crash
outside Boston, later proven false.
Let the investigatory process work.
That said, considering what’s going to be spent
compensating victims and survivors, they probably
could have upgraded the system to auto-stop trains
on red signals unless overridden by the operator ...
... and had money left over.
Relying on a single human to observe and react to
signal lights is just so 20th century, when differential
GPS can tell where each train is, and on which track
in double-track blocks (this was apparently single-track,
which is even easier to manage with GPS).
they have the technology to stop this kind of accident and didn’t? bad news for them
I'd think colorblindless would be more of a fatal handicap on the high seas or in aviation than on the roads or railways. Incidentally (I've done some research and writing on the subject), one in seven men is colorblind! Far and away the most common is red-green, although there is some rare occurence of a yellow-blue (I think that's what it was) form. Colorblindness of any type is very very rare in women, however.
I asked one of my brothers who is colorblind (to him, brown, green, and red are about the same) how he deals with stoplights. He told me: If the top one is lit, it means stop. If the bottom one is lit, it means go. What has always puzzled me the most is that this brother is also a naturally gifted (and certified) electrician -- he's a whiz at wiring and such, both in cars and in homes. Now how the hell he does that without being able to distinguish the color of the wires is beyond me, but pals and everybody in the family have preferred him for years because his work is always good, and he works for beer, food, or apple pie! No, seriously, when he wires something or troubleshoots a problem nobody else can figure out, he must do it right because his fix-it is always successful. Total mystery to me.
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