Transportation

By Lori Aratani June 17 at 10:15 AM 

Metro’s central train control center — tasked with ensuring the safety of thousands of passengers moving through the nation’s second busiest rail system — is chronically understaffed, chaotic and filled with distractions, according to a federal report released Wednesday.

Its staff members lack adequate training and have no formal checklists to help guide them as they do their jobs. Perhaps even more troubling, the report says, federal investigators who observed control center workers during a week-long period found that some employees ignored rules and used their cellphones while on the job.

These findings and other observations, are part of an unprecedented federal safety inspection of operations at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority.

Officials with the Federal Transit Administration, using investigative authority granted to them by Congress in 2012, initiated the review after a fatal Jan. 12 smoke incident in which the meltdown of track-based electrical components filled a Yellow Line tunnel with smoke just south of the L’Enfant Plaza station — sickening more than 80 riders, one of whom died.