Ventura County - Remains in the Steam Era of Transportation Infrastructure and Railroad Safety
In February 2015, the grade crossing at
Rice Ave. and Fifth St. (Fifth and Rice) in Oxnard, California was the
scene of yet another deadly Metrolink train collision. While reading
news reports of the collision, I found myself appalled by the continued
carnage at the busiest commercial intersection in Ventura County.
Beginning in April 2015, I set out to investigate the circumstances of the collision between Metrolink Train No. 102 and a Ford F-450 work truck.
Since then, I have published my own preliminary findings concerning
the deficiencies at the intersection and within the Metrolink trains
that traverse the Oxnard Plain.
As
of this writing, it has been five months since the Oxnard Metrolink
collision. In the interim, politicians and transportation agency chiefs
from throughout Southern California have agreed that the intersection
represents an ongoing danger to motorists and train passengers alike.
Most officials pointed to the 2004 election loss of a Ventura County half-cent transportation sales tax as the root of the problem.
Without matching funds from a county sales tax, neither state nor
federal money will soon be forthcoming to fix safety issues at that
serial-collision site. Experts and policymakers agree that only a
complete grade separation, utilizing a Rice Ave. overpass will eliminate
future collisions at the site. With a $35 - $40 million price tag for
the grade separation, no one in authority expects any substantial
safety improvements at the collision site for at least the next decade.
In early 2015, Metrolink named transportation veteran Art Leahy as its
new chief executive. On June 30, 2015, L.A. Times reporter Dan Weikel
interviewed Leahy regarding the important issues facing both Leahy and
Metrolink. One of those issues was the grade crossing at Fifth and
Rice. Weikel asked, “Is anything being done about Rice Avenue near
Oxnard, where a Metrolink train collided with a pickup truck and
trailer that strayed into the crossing?”
Apparently,
neither Weikel nor Leahy understood that a Ford F-450 is not a
lightweight pickup truck or that its attached trailer was transporting
heavy welding equipment. In fact, an F-450 weighs over seven tons and
can tow a trailer weighing over fifteen tons. If the F-450 rig was
fully loaded, it could have weighed more than 44,000 pounds. Nor did
the truck “stray into the crossing”. Instead, its driver, Jose Sanchez-Ramirez,
from Tucson Arizona, had prematurely made a hard right turn onto the
tracks. Eighty feet west of the intersection, his truck and trailer had
halted on the tracks in a “high-centered” position.
In answering the reporter’s question, Leahy began by reiterating the
usual Ventura County “tax and funding” issues. Then, Leahy displayed
his ignorance of what had happened in the predawn hours on that fateful
February morning. By his answer, it was obvious that Leahy had bought
into the assumption that the F-450 rig was a pickup truck that had
“strayed into the crossing”. With that in mind, Leahy made his pitch
for modest, yet superfluous safety improvements at the deadly crossing.
Leahy
stated, “I would like to look into putting sensors in the pavement.
It’s cheaper and faster to do than a grade separation”. Had Leahy read
the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) preliminary accident
report, he would have known that sensors in the pavement would not have
detected a truck and trailer stalled eighty feet from the grade
crossing. Nothing that Leahy suggested would have helped prevent the
February 2015 collision of Train No. 102.
If he wants to know what happened at Fifth and Rice, Leahy should
conduct his own site survey. In fact, it might be instructive for Leahy
to ride the Metrolink Ventura County line to Ventura one afternoon and
then take Train No. 102 back to Los Angeles the next morning. As he
approaches Fifth and Rice, I hope he is not seated at a killer worktable
in an obsolete bi-level Bombardier coach. If so, in the event of a
collision, he would have a high risk of debilitating injuries or even
death. Doubting that such a busy person as Leahy would visit a former
crash site so far from his home base in Los Angeles, I decided to
survey the scene again, nearly six months after the deadly collision.
Soon after I published two articles about Metrolink and rail safety in Ventura County, I met Mr. Marc Gerstel.
On that dark February morning, Gerstel told me, he was a passenger on
Train No. 102. According to news reports that day, "the train was
traveling at 79 mph headed out of the Oxnard Transit Center". While
sitting in the second coach, Gerstel heard the brakes engage in full
emergency mode. As his laptop computer flew across the worktable at
which he sat, he felt the collision, saw a fireball outside the window
and then began to “tumble like a tennis shoe in a dryer”. People and
objects were flying everywhere inside the obsolete bi-level Bombardier
coach in which he rode. After he struck one or more of what Metrolink has admitted for over a decade to be “killer worktables”, Gerstel sustained both a broken neck and shattered lower vertebrae.
In
early July, when I asked Marc Gerstel if he would like to visit the
scene of his recent, near-death experience, he said that he was ready.
Regular readers of this blog know that I have two characters that
accompany me on some of my fieldwork. They are Plush Kokopelli
and Coney the Traffic Cone. As Coney likes to say, “Coney is my name
and safety is my game”. Plush Kokopelli says nothing, as he is mute.
Once Gerstel saw my dynamic duo, he was glad to have them along. Perhaps
their whimsical presence softened the hard realities that he had so
recently experienced during the train collision.
After parking in a safe location, Gerstel and I agreed that we would
complete our observations from the relative safety of the public
sidewalk that runs alongside Rice Ave. From there, we could observe and
photograph much of what truck driver Jose Sanchez-Ramirez might have
seen, or not seen in the early morning darkness of February 24, 2015.
Upon
arriving at the scene, my first impression was that nothing had changed
since my visit three months earlier. To the east, there was a gaping
hole where engineer Glenn Steele watched as his cab-control car No. 645
whipped violently around and demolished a cinder block and wrought
iron wall. Railroad ties, splintered by the steel wheels of the
derailed Train No. 102 still supported the railroad tracks to either
side of the crossing. At the crossing, a concrete and steel platform
lay between the rails. While standing on its edge, where the platform
meets the sidewalk, I could feel a rumble each time a vehicle passed
by. Had the impact of steel train wheels loosened that platform from its
moorings?
For Marc Gerstel, going back so soon to the scene of the collision was
an emotional experience. On a grassy knoll, in the shade of a tree, he
found a small memorial to the engineer, Glenn Steele. Atop the memorial
was a replica of a U.S. postage stamp, “Honoring Railroad Engineers of
America”. In Memoriam. Glenn Steele – Metrolink’s No. 1 Locomotive
Engineer, who passed away in the line of duty, March 2015. “The people
knew by the whistle’s moan That the man at the throttle was Casey
Jones.” – Ballad of Casey Jones. After a moment of silence, Marc
Gerstel said to me, “He could have run to safety, but
he stayed in the cab, riding the brakes. I believe he saved my life”.
As of this writing, interested readers may make a contribution to the
family of Glenn Steele at a memorial website in his honor.
Sadly, rail crossing infrastructure
deficiencies and an unsafe train configuration took the life of
Metrolink engineer Glenn Steele. Since the Metrolink Oxnard collision,
no one in any corporation, legislative body or government agency has
moved to mitigate the unsafe conditions still present at the Fifth and
Rice grade crossing. In fact, since workers removed the wreckage from
the tracks, nothing except the addition of a memorial to engineer Glenn Steele has changed at the collision site. To the untutored eye, Fifth and Rice
looks like a typical railroad grade crossing in Ventura County. To the
cognoscenti, it is a patchwork of neglect, quick fixes and glaring
danger. Although the use of bailing wire is not evident at the
collision site, there is plenty of exposed electrical tape keeping the
warning signals alive.
Each
day, officials at the City of Oxnard, Ventura County, Union Pacific
Railroad, Amtrak, Metrolink and regional rail authority LOSSAN
hold their collective breath, hoping that history will not repeat
itself at Fifth and Rice. In their collective inaction, they play a
game of Russian roulette with the thousands of vehicle occupants and
train passengers that cross there each day. Bureaucratic thinking and
institutional inertia rule the day. Like a yachtsman who yells,
“Tonnage” as he careens closer to a smaller boat, the big iron of the
railroad rules the grade crossing at Fifth and Rice. After dreaming
about their own collision with a Ford F-450 at that site, do the
politicians, bureaucrats and agency executives awaken to the sound of a train whistle, howling in the night? If not, perhaps they should.
This is Part 1 of a two-part article. To read Part 2, please click HERE.
To read all of our Ventura County railroad safety articles in one place, please visit 5thandRice.com.
By James McGillis at 10:48 PM | | Comments (0) | Link
No comments:
Post a Comment