Norton Says Recommendation for Non-Punitive Reporting May be the Key to Safety Culture at Metro

Norton Says Recommendation for Non-Punitive Reporting May be the Key to Safety Culture Change at Metro

July 27, 2010

WASHINGTON, DC - Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) said that she was not surprised that the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) found today that a track circuit failure and the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority's (WMTA) failure to maintain and monitor the track circuit system chiefly contributed to the June 22, 2009, Red Line train collision, which took the lives of nine people, including seven District of Columbia residents. Norton commended the NTSB for reporting the track circuit failure possibility early on, long before today's preliminary report, so that corrective action could be taken by Metro and other rail systems in the U.S. while NTSB's investigation continued. She said that House committee hearings also had raised concerns about another contributing cause to the crash cited by NTSB, the absence of an adequate safety culture at Metro. However, Norton said that she cannot tell from the outline of the preliminary report released today why an unsafe culture arose and that more hearings in the House will be necessary to determine the causes and the remedies. Norton took particular note of NTSB's recommendation that the Federal Transit Administration should develop non-punitive safety reporting programs for all transit agencies, to hear concerns from employees at all levels. She said that the non-punitive reporting programs would be necessary to ensure a new safety culture. "The NTSB report is right in implying that if reporting safety problems results in punitive action, such problems will not be readily reported," Norton said. "Hearings will help us determine whether punitive action by Metro has contributed to safety culture issues there and whether state-of-the-art alternatives are available." The NTSB also noted that Metro's failure to replace or retrofit the 1000 series cars, built in the 1970s, contributed to the severity of the damage from the crash, but Norton said that there were no funds available to buy new cars until Congress provided Metro with the first of ten $150 million installments just last year, which Norton has worked for years to secure. She noted that what was released today was not a full report, but a preliminary outline of the final report, which will take several more weeks to complete.