Editorial: LIRR must combat human failure
Passengers wait at Penn Station after a lightning strike hit electrical equipment that shut down signals near Jamaica, forcing the LIRR to a halt on Sept. 29, 2011. Credit: Photo by Craig Ruttle
Lightning strikes are acts of God, but the damage they do depends on human choices. In the case of the Long Island Rail Road outages on Sept. 29, a report by the MTA's inspector general concluded it was largely bad judgment that allowed lightning to shut down the system and leave thousands of commuters in the lurch.
Customers have every right to be angry. When the LIRR installed a new $56-million signal system in 2010, it chose one specifically built to protect against lightning strikes. But without consulting designer Ansaldo STS, the railroad added a component that was never part of the original design. The error was compounded when workers used the wrong connector to tie the systems together, because they had run out of the proper ones.
The flawed connector allowed the lightning surge to knock out the signal system and its backup, stranding 17 trains between stations and nine more at platforms. Worse, the LIRR did not contact Ansaldo for five hours because it did not have emergency numbers. There was no manual for the system, and the first fix the LIRR tried brought down a whole other signal system.
The LIRR says the problems have been addressed, but it must fix the procedures that allowed this installation to be so shoddy. The LIRR can't control the weather, but it can -- and must -- control its own responses. Those, and not the lightning, are what caused so much trouble.
