The commuter train that struck and killed two San Francisco Bay area transit workers did not have a front-facing video recorder, but interviews, inspections, audio recordings and camera footage from the train's cab should provide enough evidence to determine a cause for the accident, a federal investigator said Sunday.
Jim Southworth, the National Transportation Safety Board's railroad accident investigator-in-charge, confirmed that Saturday's accident involved a Bay Area Rapid Transit district train that was not carrying any passengers because of the labor strike that has shut down the BART system since Friday.
But whether the work stoppage by members of the system's two largest unions or the way BART management deployed non-striking workers during the shutdown played a role in the fatalities will not be known for weeks or months, Southworth said.
"My concern coming out here, as it is for every investigation, is to find out what happened, to gather the facts," he said. "Whether the strike plays a role in that I can't say at this time."
BART officials said on Sunday that they could no longer discuss the accident because of the ongoing NTSB investigation. The district's assistant general manager has said that the four-car train with several employees aboard was returning from a routine maintenance trip and being run in automatic mode under computer control when it struck the workers who were inspecting a section of track in the East Bay city of Walnut Creek.
Neither BART nor the county coroner has released the names and ages of the victims — one a BART employee and the other a contractor. They were the sixth and seventh workers to die on the job in the system's 41-year history.
Southworth said it is too early to know how fast the train was going or if workers saw or heard it coming. He and a colleague hope to interview the person who was operating the train and BART dispatchers as soon as Monday.
Even if the strike ended immediately, the ongoing investigation means it would probably take a few days before trains could run on those tracks, he said.
"These accidents occur in an instant, but they take very long to investigate," he said.
The NTSB has been promoting improved safety measures for track maintenance crews since the May death of a foreman who was killed by a passenger train in West Haven, Conn., spokesman Eric Weiss said.
In June, the board urged the Metro-North Railroad to provide backup protection for crews that were relying on dispatchers to close tracks while they are being worked on and to light the appropriate signals.
The investigators now in California will be checking to see if BART uses "shunts" — a device that crews can attach to the rails in a work zone that gives approaching trains a stop signal — or any other of the backup measures the NTSB recommended for the Metro-North system, Weiss said.
"Obviously, we are very concerned anytime anyone dies in transportation accidents, but we're very interested in the issue of track worker deaths right now," he said.
A 2007 report by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that between 1993 and 2002 a total of 460 railroad workers died on the job, 132 of them were pedestrian workers struck by trains and other rail vehicles. Of all the accidents, 62 involved local passenger trains.
