February 24, 2018
New Jersey Transits Hidden Danger: Bad Brakes, Bare Wires, Rotten Parts 0
Federal inspectors found scores of New Jersey Transit train cars riddled with fire risks, faulty brakes and electrical hazards as they scrutinized the troubled railroad that brings 95,000 workers to Manhattan daily.
One engine was so defective it was declared unsafe, documents obtained under New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act show. In some cases, NJ Transit’s own checks failed to identify faults brought to light a day or two later by Federal Railroad Administration officials. One was a locomotive with seized air valves and misaligned foundation gear that compromised the braking system’s very core. Another had broken equipment that provides traction on slippery tracks.
While federal regulators regularly inspect railroads, safety failures at NJ Transit led them to conduct a deeper audit in 2016. Though the agency appears to have mostly resolved its findings, the inspectors last year tested NJ Transit equipment with unprecedented frequency, uncovering persistent defects that speak to years of budget starvation and routine risks for more than 300,000 daily riders.
Incurious Inspections
“How do you claim it’s OK for service?" said Richard Beall, a retired railroad engineer and Miami-based train-accident consultant. “It needs to be gone over with a fine-tooth comb every day. If the FRA can find a missing brake clip, I can find a missing clip, too.”
The 400 pages of reports validate riders’ social-media gripes about screeching wheels and rickety suspensions. Passengers have little ability to assess their personal safety. Neither the FRA nor NJ Transit makes the findings readily accessible; NJ Transit took more than five months to fulfill Bloomberg’s public-records request.
In 2017, eight recorders were in use beyond their mandated inspection deadlines, according to the FRA.
“If that lead locomotive is missing its event recorder, now you’re missing the most vital stuff on the train — bells, headlights on,” Beall said. “It’s fine to have another recorder on the train, but it’s not duplicative.”
Nancy Snyder, an NJ Transit spokeswoman, said all recorders now are inspected daily.
Hand in Hand
Diane Gutierrez-Scaccetti, the acting New Jersey transportation commissioner and NJ Transit chairwoman, said agency and federal regulators are cooperating closely.
“They’re our partner in this, not our punisher,” she said at a news conference in Trenton on Feb. 15.
NJ Transit says it’s addressed many flaws identified by inspectors. The resting engineer in Hoboken wasn’t violating rules because he was on break, according to Snyder. Still, the episode was raised as a cause for concern by the railroad administration, which recommended a fine because all the train’s brakes weren’t applied.
NJ Transit appears to have mostly tackled worn track parts, misaligned switches and unsecured trains discovered in 2016 and 2015, when inspectors recommended fines totaling at least $262,000. In Hoboken, Dover and Little Falls, inspectors in June 2017 found NJ Transit following rules on switches, personal protective equipment, warning bells and hand brakes, problem areas in the past.
Fire Hazards
Staff “has exceeded my expectations in their drive” to fine-tune a safety program in Hoboken, Inspector Douglas E. Johnson wrote on June 28.
In the first nine months of 2017, inspectors documented 140 hazards just on train floors or passageways. Unlocked high-voltage electrical panels were widespread, and 18 contained ticket collectors’ paper seat checks — some touching bare wires. New Jersey Transit conducted an internal investigation, though it wasn’t able to identify who was responsible. Inspectors recommended a fine.
“Detailed instructions have been given to crews and the issue has been resolved,” Snyder said. No more seat checks have been found stashed in the panels, she said.
In a Morrisville, Pennsylvania, yard on March 13, Locomotive 6044 was “not in proper condition and safe to operate,” with complete air-brake reservoir failure. An inspector that day documented 24 defects on 14 vehicles, including missing exit signs and emergency glow-in-the-dark evacuation routes, wheel disc pads that lacked retaining clips and seized air-brake cocks.
Snyder wrote in an email that “all these components/parts are routinely replaced as they get damaged from wear and tear.”
Neglected Engines
Elsewhere, electrical grounding was non-existent on 23 cars, and 60 had suspension problems. Nine locomotives were in use beyond their mandated inspection dates. Eleven had either reduced or no capacity to spread slip-reducing grit on rails.
Democratic Governor Phil Murphy, who took office Jan. 16, has pledged to turn around a model operation that he said became “a national disgrace.” Under his predecessor, two-term Republican Chris Christie, NJ Transit’s annual state subsidy was cut as much as 90 percent, and $3.44 billion of its capital budget was diverted to cover daily expenses.
NJ Transit's Shaky Subsidy
Christie administration cut transit aid by 90 percent.
Source: New Jersey budgets
“If you use capital funds for day-to-day operations, it’s a snowball-type of effect, and it will be severe,” said Robert Halstead, a Syracuse, New York, accident analyst who investigated the Hoboken crash. “You’ve got to spend money or the tougher it gets to ever get back on top. Some railroads never do.”
Pressing Deadline
NJ Transit, a driver of the state’s employment and high property values, faces tremendous pressure to regain efficiency.
Despite a December 2018 federal deadline to install emergency-braking technology, software bugs led the agency to suspend installations on 400 locomotives. The sole rail link to Manhattan, a century-old Amtrak tunnel beneath the Hudson River, is crumbling and President Donald Trump has balked at a federal cost-share to construct a second crossing.
NJ Transit has the nation’s second-highest number of train breakdowns, and operates a fleet that includes 50-year-old locomotives and more than 300 passenger cars built in the 1970s and 1980s. In 2017, inspectors repeatedly cited missing or broken latches that allowed heavy cabinet doors to swing free. One car’s bathroom door was secured with duct tape.
“It is taking us longer to get parts,” Robert Lavell, the NJ Transit rail operations director who’s retiring in March, told lawmakers last month. In earlier testimony before that committee, which is investigating the railroad’s finances and slipping service, NJ Transit management said it was short-staffed throughout the system.
On Feb. 15, a week after Bloomberg obtained the inspection reports, Murphy told reporters that NJ Transit is meeting with suppliers to get more inventory and hiring technicians to step up repairs and inspections.
“The thousands of rank-and-file workers who show up every day at NJ Transit, some of whom are with us today, are not to blame,” Murphy said at the Trenton rail station. “In many ways they are the ones who have kept this system running and safe in the absence of real leadership and vision.”
March 1, 2018
Emma Bonino: Italy’s pro-Europe, pro-immigrant conscience 0
by MeDaryl • Cars • Tags: Europe, Italy, politics, World news
The former foreign minister, activist and politician has radical ideas for todays Italy
Forty years ago, Emma Bonino fought to secure abortion rights in Italy in the shadow of the Vatican. Her campaign involved hunger strikes and a three-week stint in jail.
These days, the former foreign minister, activist and candidate for parliament, is waging an equally difficult battle in support of migrants and in defence of Europe, two ideas that seem radical in todays bitter political environment.
There is, Bonino says, an invisible thread that connects the causes of her life.
You can look at the fights I have waged with this point of view: I support a democratic liberal order and believe in the centrality of the individual, his rights but also his responsibilities, she says.
Those ideas, she adds, are under threat.
Bonino is an icon in Italy. Her supporters might call her the conscience of the country.
While she is not realistically hoping to win next Sundays national election, if Bonino and her party More Europe do well, she will win 3% of the highly fractured Italian vote, a result that would give her control of her own parliamentary group. It would also grant her a fair amount of influence in the event that the election ends, as many expect, with the creation of a grand coalition government between the centre right and centre left parties headed by two former prime ministers, Silvio Berlusconi and Matteo Renzi.
The 69-year-old has gained momentum over recent weeks, despite the fact that her ideas including granting citizenship to immigrants run contrary to the prevailing winds in Italy, where migrants are increasingly the target of political vitriol, and where Brussels has been blamed for the countrys economic woes.
In an interview in her small rooftop apartment, which has a terrace overlooking St Peters Basilica, Bonino a lung cancer survivor admits she is frailer than she once was, but is driven by passion for her politics and concerns for the country.
If I look back 50 years ago, if you look at womens rights, I cannot even recognise my country, the change has been enormous, she says. That doesnt mean it is all done. On the contrary, rights are a process, and if you dont care for them, you can lose them from morning to night.
She has been thinking about the banality of evil, the term coined by Hannah Arendt, the political theorist who examined the rise of Nazism, after she saw a viral video of an elderly Italian woman harassing a black man on a bus while other passengers looked on.
Arendt explains how one small sign happens after the other that no one cares about, and then you suddenly find yourself in hell, she says.
The signs that are worrying Bonino are escalating incidents of political intolerance on the left and the right, racist attacks that are not adequately challenged, the lack of resilience in institutions, and the mediocrity of leaders.
She was disturbed by two recent incidents of violence against women, and how differently the murders were treated in the press based on the race of the suspected perpetrators: one, a migrant from Nigeria, and another, a white Italian.
There is no excuse for this kind of thing, she says. There are many things you can do to counter this phenomenon: public speeches, videos, talking in schools, exactly like the entrepreneurs of fear use. It is not true that we dont have tools to react, we are simply not using them in an assertive way.
One of her top political priorities is giving legal status to hundreds of thousands of migrants who are in Italy illegally, much as Berlusconi did in 2000.
She is convinced that Europes demographic challenges and low birthrates will, eventually, give European capitals a wake-up call about their need to welcome immigrants.
Sooner or later, we will recognise that we need them, she says. For the moment the political mood is so bad, so unhealthy, that there is no way to talk rationally.
While Bonino is not worried that Italy might leave the EU, she believes that the constant targeting of Brussels as the source of the countrys problems will have a long-term negative impact.
Its very simple. On one side you have Putin and on the other side you have Trump. You have China and south of the Mediterranean is on fire. If this is the new landscape, if we go on as 27 small states, each on his own, where do we go? she says.
If we continue with blaming Europe, we will never make it better. It will stay as it is, like a boat taking water. So in the end, the boat will sink out of inertia, she adds.
Bonino has her share of gripes with the EU, particularly in its handling of the Libya crisis. She condemns, as a stark violation of every sort of international convention, the manner in which Italy has sought to keep migrants from entering the continent.
We know that the ones who are saved [by the Libyan coastguard], that they are lost forever, and that no one knows what their life will be, she says. We know we are sending them back to hell, we know the conditions of the detention centres they keep. I dont call that a success, I cannot call that a success.
In contrast to her fight with the Catholic church 40 years ago, Bonino can, these days, count on at least one ally: Pope Francis.
The two, she says with a grin, are in touch. We have some connections, so we pass messages quite often, through friends.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/26/emma-bonino-italys-pro-europe-pro-immigrant-conscience