With the National Transportation Safety Board taking over the investigation of Monday's fatal crash of two trains on the Washington Metro's Red Line, the federal investigation and the capital's transit system will open a new chapter in a long and contentious relationship.
For more than a quarter-century, the NTSB has been a persistent critic of the management and operations of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Administration - the regional agency that operates the subway system.
In report after report following both fatal and nonfatal crashes, the NTSB has criticized the agency for papering over safety problems, ignoring warnings from front-line managers, disregarding agency recommendations and failing to learn from its mistakes. Before Monday's crash, there had been at least four fatal incidents killing seven people - three passengers and four transit administration employees - in Metro's history.
After a 1982 crash that killed three passengers in a tunnel near the Smithsonian Institution, the NTSB found that it resulted from mistakes by a driver and supervisors who were poorly trained and ill-equipped to perform their jobs. The board blamed the management's "failure to put into place an adequate program of initial and recurrent training."
In 1996, after a collision that killed a transit administration operator at the Shady Grove Metro station, Metro officials quickly pinned the blame on the dead driver and a low-level supervisor.
After an investigation, however, the NTSB found that the primary cause was the system's "incompetence and arrogance" in failing to follow its own safety recommendations.
The board also recommended that Metro reinforce its rail cars' structure to prevent "telescoping" during a crash. But the transit system, which is not required to follow the NTSB's advice, spent the next eight years protesting that strengthening the cars would be too expensive.
Then, in 2004, a runaway train with only an operator aboard rolled into an occupied train at the Woodley Park metro station near the National Zoo. Twenty passengers were injured when the car that took the brunt of the impact telescoped into itself.
At the time, the NTSB member at the scene of the crash said half of the "survivable space" in the crash was lost.
That member was Deborah A.P. Hersman, who reported to the scene of Monday's crash as the agency's on-scene spokeswoman.
