D.C. Firefighters Lacked Radio Reception During Jan. 12 Metro Rescue, Report Says
Washington firefighters “encountered difficulty communicating with each other” on the 800 MHz band used for their radios while attempting to rescue passengers from a train in a smoke-filled Metrorail tunnel and in the adjacent L’Enfant Plaza station Jan. 12, said the city’s Fire and Emergency Medical Services (FEMS) department Saturday in a report. Firefighters were delayed in their rescue of passengers stranded on the Metrorail train because their radios weren’t functioning properly in the station and tunnels, FEMS said in its report to D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat.
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The FEMS radios are still able to function as direct-communication “walkie-talkies” when reception is poor, but firefighters ultimately needed to use cellphones to call for backup, FEMS said. FEMS and the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) are facing scrutiny from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and others over their handling of the incident, in which a Metrorail train stopped 800 feet past the L’Enfant Plaza station and filled with smoke caused by the train system’s electric-powered third rail. One passenger died and 84 others went to D.C.-area hospitals for treatment because of the incident.
FEMS officials and WMATA were apparently aware of the lack of radio coverage days before the Jan. 12 incident, FEMS said. FEMS units responded to a separate incident at the L’Enfant Plaza station Jan. 7 “and reported no 800MHz radio coverage anywhere in the station, including the right-of-way,” a FEMS official said in a Jan. 8 e-mail to a WMATA official included in the report. "We were troubleshooting the system at the time and likely had Lenfant station disconnected,” the WMATA official said in a responding email. “We are also having trouble with the tunnel areas which we are troubleshooting. The stations seem fine.” The FEMS official asked WMATA to “please keep me in the loop with any radio maintenance you may be doing” that would affect FEMS operations.
FEMS said its report “is not representative” of NTSB's independent investigation of the incident, which would include the FEMS response to the incident. FEMS prepared its report at Bowser's request. D.C.’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency also is preparing a report on the incident. A spokesman for WMATA declined to comment because of its involvement in the NTSB investigation. The NTSB said in a statement that it's continuing to “gather information” and “investigators are also gathering information on the disruption to the power system, maintenance of the transit system, emergency response and evacuation.”
Details on the extent of 800 MHz radio reception in the Metrorail system or the possible implications of those radio communication failures are likely to remain unclear until the NTSB releases its report, an industry lawyer told us. Breakdowns in public safety communications on mass transit are already “pretty serious,” but “there’s a high premium in the nation’s capital for having interoperability and reliability, both of which are at issue in this case,” the lawyer said. D.C.-area governments generally have been “pretty good on interoperability” since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the lawyer said.