EPIC TRIMET FAIL
Epic
fail Trimet Maintenance of Way Management and Supervisors. Yesterday a
failure of the Steel Bridge at Portland's premier event the Rose
Festival fleets arrival. This failure made the news. Trimet couldn't
even muster the staff to come and repair it and relied on the luck of
getting an ODOT crew that was in the area to inspect it so as the bridge
tender could overide the Trimet signal locks and lift the bridge for
the ships. Lets hope there isn't a national emergency that requires a
quick bridge lift for the military ships to leave and it malfunctions
and no crew to repair it. Last week a derailment in the Ruby Yard.
Incidents of crossing gates being left waiting for a Maintainer to
respond to it for hours. When is Trimet's upper management going to wise
up and clean house on its Maintenance of Way management and supervisory staff.
Trimet's Light Rail MOW supervisory group not having the knowledge to
do the investigation of the derailment themselves, I was told had to
rely on a low seniority employee of the dept to ghost write the report
for them. Because if that is true, an employee of the dept. that is
vested with maintaining the equipment in question should probably not be
the one investigating the accident. It could certainly raise questions
of impropriety. Sadly our department management and supervisors have
very little knowledge of what their crews job functions are. Having
worked at a heavy rail property prior to working a Trimet it is hard to
believe that a responsibility like accident investigation would be
treated with such disregard as to the importance of getting the facts
straight.
Why is this happening when we have been operating
light Rail for 30+ years without these kind of issues, A manager with a
Napolean complex implementing a policy with a disregard for all the
history of how to do the job right. He was warned by all of us that this
scheme of splitting the crew and putting half on graveyard shift would
not work, so when they pay no attention to those who know how to and do
the job this is the results.
7 comments:
Ouch... the truth hurts.
These allegations of safety violations, if true, are extremely concerning.
A train derailment in the yard is quite serious. Self reporting on accident investigations? Malfunctiong gate arms left untended? ODOT crews bypassing or overiding a switch on a TriMet alignment?
Bring in the Feds..where on earth is the safety oversght for this agency?
Sounds more like half-truths with a somewhat extreme prejudice tone.
Has somebody has been wronged?
Yes..public safety.
Safety is a big concern as well as questions of impropriety. How have derailment accidents been investigated in the past?
Uh, the Steel Bridge is owned and operated by Union Pacific, leased to ODOT, then subleased to TriMet. When the bridge loses power during a lift, how exactly is that TriMet's fault?
The bridges failure was due to a trimet signal relay failure. In itself not an unusual defect. In the past due to adequet staff, personnel were minutes away, now due to a bonehead manager personnel may not be available at all. 100 year old bridge+mismanagement = massive delays and safety being put on the back burner.
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