Metro Derailment Occurred After Technician Disregarded Rail Defect
A Metro derailment that crippled large parts of the subway for hours Aug. 6 resulted from “a failure” of the transit agency’s “quality check process,” in which a technician disregarded a rail defect found by a track-inspection machine several weeks before the accident occurred. “The report finds that the root cause of the derailment is failure of the rail fasteners that hold the rail in place, which resulted in the rail spreading wide enough for the wheel axle [of a train] to drop between the rails,” said the document, prepared by Metro.
The train, which was not carrying passengers, jumped the rails between the Federal Triangle and Smithsonian stations. The accident forced Metro to close the two stations and halt service on stretches of the Orange, Blue and Silver lines for nine hours, leaving tens of thousands of riders scrambling for alternatives.
The technician and one of his supervisors have resigned from Metro, according to the transit agency, which publicly apologized for the derailment and said it issued $750,000 in fare refunds to 158,000 SmarTrip cardholders who were inconvenienced.
