Federal transit regulators blasted the MBTA Friday for violating an order prohibiting the usage of lone staff on tracks put in place final week, and threatened to remove federal funding if the company doesn’t get its act collectively.
In a letter to MBTA General Manager Phillip Eng obtained by the Herald, Federal Transit Administration Chief Safety Officer Joe DeLorenzo stated regulators discovered the MBTA directed a lone MBTA worker onto tracks to help a disabled prepare Wednesday, which “constitutes a direct violation of FTA’s” Sept. 14 restriction.
A particular order issued by the MBTA the identical morning allowing the usage of lone staff in emergency conditions additionally crossed the FTA’s restriction, DeLorenzo wrote within the letter. The FTA decided that the MBTA used lone staff “in other instances since issuance” of the Sept. 14 ban.
The FTA granted an exception to the restriction on lone staff Eng pushed for in a letter despatched to the FTA this week. Eng argued the MBTA ought to be capable to use lone staff to take care of disabled trains, hand throw a change that’s flashing out of correspondence, or for a dropped monitor circuit, amongst different issues.
In the Friday letter, DeLorenzo stated the FTA and the state Department of Public Utilities, which offers security oversight, will “closely monitor the MBTA’s implementation of these exception measures.”
But it got here with a stark warning.
“Failure to implement these measures and comply with FTA’s [immediate action letter] may necessitate additional enforcement actions by FTA, including but not limited to redirecting the use of federal funds, funds withholding, and imposing further restrictions or prohibitions on MBTA’s operations,” DeLorenzo wrote.
In an announcement after the Friday letter arrived, Eng stated his company has been “in frequent communication” with the FTA earlier than and after receiving the letter.
Eng stated there are circumstances when lone staff are warranted for “emergency response and public safety.” While the FTA was reviewing the exception request, Eng stated, the MBTA “believed we could continue those practices.”
“The FTA has clarified its position, and we fully respect that,” Eng stated. “Those dialogues resulted in a positive outcome with regards to improved practices for the safety [of] our employees and the public.”
The letter from DeLorenzo finishes off a turbulent week on the MBTA replete with a serious organizational shift, a pause on some monitor work — which was prolonged by at the very least the weekend — and the revelation the company is auditing its buses due to emergency communication tools failures.
In the Friday letter, DeLorenzo outlined an earlier incident the place a lone employee confronted “substantial risk.”
A employee was on the Longfellow Bridge on Sept. 6 at 4:15 a.m. when upkeep automobiles began approaching on each tracks to the operations management middle, DeLorenzo stated.
“This incident posed an immediate and substantial risk to the safety of the lone worker, who had no safe escape route while the vehicles were approaching,” DeLorenzo wrote. “Fortunately, the worker reached the [operations control center] in time to avert a potentially tragic outcome, with the maintenance vehicles halted and the worker successfully clearing the tracks unharmed.”
An investigation into the incident discovered “significant deficiencies in MBTA safety protocols,” DeLorenzo wrote. The dispatcher who directed the upkeep automobiles onto the bridge was “unaware of the lone worker’s presence,” based on DeLorenzo.
The FTA additionally stated it found the MBTA used lone staff with out coming into their location right into a monitoring system or “ensuring appropriate supervisor awareness and authorization,” DeLorenzo wrote.
“These deficiencies were also present in a series of other near misses occurring at the MBTA since Aug. 10, 2023,” DeLorenzo wrote.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”