Sound Transit Board member holds agency to blame for train derailment

Pierce County Executive Bruce Dammeier may sit on the Sound Transit Board of Directors, but that doesn’t stop him from looking at his own agency through a critical lens — especially in the wake of a federal investigation’s finding that Sound Transit was in large part responsible for 2017’s fatal Amtrak train derailment near DuPont.

Three passengers died and dozens were injured when a train took a sharp turn at 80 miles per hour and derailed onto southbound I-5 on Dec. 18, 2017. The Portland-bound train had been on its maiden voyage on the new Point Defiance Bypass between Tacoma and Nisqually, meant to shorten the trip from Seattle to Portland.

After a 17-month investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that Sound Transit, the Washington State Department of Transportation, Amtrak, and the Federal Railroad Administration were all to blame for the train derailment. Sound Transit, which was responsible for the new tracks, did not adequately identify hazards on the tracks to prevent dangerous situations, according to the NTSB.

“When the accident happened, I was probably under the impression that it was going to be human error,” Dammeier told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson. “But in this case, the systematic failure by, first and foremost, Sound Transit, also WSDOT, Amtrak, and the Federal Railroad Administration … set the engineer and our communities up to fail.”

Sen. O’Ban says Sound Transit employees should lose jobs over fatal derailment

Now he is asking if Sound Transit understood “the responsibilities and obligations as the track owner,” and if it leaned too much on the other agencies involved, such as Amtrak and WSDOT, to do the real hazard mitigation work. He assumes the answer to these questions is a large yes.

“The thing that is very concerning is when you have three agencies — Sound Transit, Amtrak, and WSDOT — that purport to have safety as their primary responsibility, and I believe that they all think they do, but certainly it did not work out that way,” he said. “There were a series of failures at each agency that compounded one another, that led us to that fateful day.”

As he wrote on his blog, Dammeier wants to know if anyone at Sound Transit noticed that a 30-miles-per-hour turn on a track that is normally 80 miles per hour could be a problem, and if “someone dismissed the likelihood and the responsibility.”

While he doesn’t call for employees to lose their jobs, he does want to see greater accountability on the part of Sound Transit. He would like to see the agency own up to its mistakes and take steps to ensure nothing like the deadly train derailment ever happens again.

To this end, Sound Transit plans to launch an independent third-party investigation into the train derailment.

“They cannot treat this as an isolated incident because I think the core foundation of this that made this an unsafe train track could apply in other areas as well,” Dammeier said. “And we’ve got to look broadly to make sure we’re addressing all of it.”

The public needs its confidence in Sound Transit restored, he said.

“I owe it to the people of Pierce County to know that as those trains drive through our county, that they’re going to be operated safely, whether our people are driving on the highway below them or riding on the train,” he said.

It’s somewhat ironic that Dammeier now sits on the 18-member Sound Transit Board of Directors, given that he publicly opposed the $54 billion Sound Transit 3 plan before voters approved it in 2016. However, he wants to use his oversight to “make sure that it delivers what it promised to the voters.”

“A lot of people have encouraged me to be that critical voice, to be that thoughtful, critical voice on the board because people in our region need that perspective on the board,” he said.

This has left him as a minority on the board, which is made up of mayors, county executives, and city and county council members from Snohomish, King, and Pierce Counties. He is determined to represent Pierce County voters, the majority of whom did not vote in favor of ST3.

“I can tell you that I’ve taken a lot of votes in my political career, but rarely have I ever been the sole ‘no’ vote as many times as I have on the Sound Transit Board,” he said with a laugh.

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