Dozing is cited in O’Hare derailment

32 hurt; train operator ‘extremely tired,’ union chief says

Chicago Police work the scene where a Chicago Transit Authority derailed at the O'Hare Airport station early Monday, March 24, 2014, in Chicago. More than 30 people were injured after the eight-car train plowed across a platform and scaled an escalator at the underground station. (AP Photo/Andrew A. Nelles)
Chicago Police work the scene where a Chicago Transit Authority derailed at the O'Hare Airport station early Monday, March 24, 2014, in Chicago. More than 30 people were injured after the eight-car train plowed across a platform and scaled an escalator at the underground station. (AP Photo/Andrew A. Nelles)

CHICAGO - The president of a Chicago transit union said Monday that there are indications that a train operator dozed off before the train jumped the tracks and scaled an escalator at one of the nation’s busiest airports, injuring 32 people.

The operator told Amalgamated Transit Union Local 308 President Robert Kelly that she had worked a lot of overtime recently and was “extremely tired” at the time of the derailment, he said at a news conference.

The derailment happened just before 3 a.m. Monday at the end of the Chicago Transit Authority’s Blue Line at O’Hare International Airport. No one suffered life-threatening injuries.

The timing of the accident helped avoid an enormous disaster, as the underground Blue Line station is usually packed with travelers coming to and from Chicago.

A transit authority supervisor and another worker near the top of the escalator said they saw the train enter at a normal rate of speed, about 15 mph, Kelly said.

“The next thing they heard the sound [of impact] and the yelling and the screaming,” he said.

The train is designed so that if an operator becomes incapacitated and his hand slips off the controls, it should come to a stop. Kelly speculated that, upon impact, inertia may have thrown the operator against the hand switch, accelerating it enough to send it catapulting onto the escalator.

Denise Adams, a passenger on the train, described the impact to reporters.

“I heard a ‘Boom!’ and when I got off the train, the train was all the way up the escalator,” she said. “It was a lot of panic.”

Monday’s accident occurred almost six months after an unoccupied Blue Line train rumbled down a track for nearly a mile and struck another train head-on at the other end of the line in September. Dozens were hurt in that accident, which prompted the transit authority to make several safety changes.

Investigators will review video footage from a camera in the station and one that was mounted on the front of the train, National Transportation Safety Board official Tim DePaepe said. The train will remain at the scene until the safety board has finished some of its investigation, after which crews will remove the train and fix the escalator, which has “significant damage.”

The train operator, who has worked for the transit authority for about a year, suffered a leg injury and has been released from the hospital. She will be interviewed by investigators today, Kelly said.

Kelly described the train operator after the accident as distraught but still able to help passengers.

“She immediately got out of the cab and started asking everybody and checking to make sure that everybody was OK,” he said.

Hours after the crash, the front of the first car could still be seen near the top of the escalator.

While the station is shut down, the transit authority is busing passengers to and from O’Hare to the next station on the line.

The injured were taken to area hospitals, and Chicago Fire Commissioner Jose Santiago said Monday morning that most were able to walk away from the wreck unaided.

Chicago’s 240-mile subway system, which had fallen into disrepair in recent decades, has recently undergone renovations.

A four-year, $429 million overhaul has started on the Blue Line from O’Hare to downtown. The line, which still has stations built in the late 1800s, was extended to O’Hare in the early 1980s.

Transit officials say there are more than 80,000 daily riders along the Blue Line O’Hare branch.

Information for this article was contributed by Lindsey Tanner of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 2 on 03/25/2014

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