Federal transit safety investigators will be reviewing all of New York City’s subway operations in response to a collision and derailment that caused minor injuries to more than 20 people, the chairperson of the National Transportation Safety Board said Friday.
Chair Jennifer Homendy said the NTSB had concerns because Thursday’s collision between two trains was the second serious subway episode in Manhattan in just over a month. On Nov. 29, a subway worker for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority was dragged under a train and killed while working as a rail safety flagger.
“This is the second accident on New York City transit’s property in 37 days. That’s not typical,” Homendy said at a news conference at the 96th Street station, where Thursday’s collision happened. “The NTSB has been very focused on system safety … so coming here we are going to want to look at the entire system, including how it is managed and supervised.”
Homendy said later Friday that the NTSB typically reviews a company’s entire operations and safety protocols in its investigations.
Pat Warren, the MTA’s chief safety and security officer, said the agency was aware of the NTSB’s comprehensive approach.
“For a subway system that schedules 2.7 million train trips a year, covering 345 million miles annually, this derailment was a rare occurrence that points to the safety and resilience of transit in New York,” Warren said in a statement Friday night.
The low-speed crash on the Upper West Side took place at about 3 p.m. on the 1, 2 and 3 lines. Homendy said an out-of-service train with a few MTA workers aboard struck another train carrying about 300 passengers at a rail switch, causing both trains to derail.
Workers on the out-of-service train had been making repairs after someone pulled a number of emergency stop cords and disabled the train. After resetting most of the brakes and disabling others, the workers were trying to get the train to the 240th Street railyard…
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