It’s the blind leading the sleepy at Metro-North.
After an engineer’s alleged dozing caused a derailment last Sunday that killed four people, a Post investigation found that dangerous train drivers get little more than a slap on the wrist by the agency.
On Feb. 7, 1987, engineer Daniel J. O’Brien missed a stop signal in The Bronx at the Mott Haven junction where the railroad’s Hudson, Harlem and New Haven lines connect. His empty engine hurtled off the rails and crashed into a Croton-Harmon-bound train filled with 500 evening commuters. Twenty-seven were hurt.
“If it worked out differently, you could easily have had 200 or 300 people dead or injured,” a medic told The Post at the time.
Metro-North fired O’Brien, who claimed he never saw the red signal despite tests that showed it was functioning normally.
But 12 years later, the railroad inexplicably rehired O’Brien.
On May 24, 2012, O’Brien, now 60, again broke the cardinal rule of rail safety. He missed a stop signal — this time at Grand Central Terminal.
He was suspended for 30 days without pay — and because of an arduous, union-involved disciplinary process, the punishment wasn’t meted out until more than a year later.
O’Brien, who made $139,700 last year, is still allowed to drive for Metro-North, although he is currently out on sick leave.
Last Sunday, four miles from the 1987 crash site on the same railroad, engineer William Rockefeller, allegedly groggy at the controls, sped through a sharp turn in The Bronx at 82 mph instead of the 30-mph limit. The resulting derailment killed four and injured 63. Rockefeller, 46, has been suspended without pay while the accident is investigated. Bronx prosecutors are weighing criminal charges.
It was the first fatal crash in Metro-North’s 30-year history but the third major accident in the last seven months.
Metro-North’s leniency in the O’Brien case and others illustrate what some critics say is a lax attitude toward safety and unsafe employees.
The commuter railroad has suspended 49 employees for safety infractions — but fired only one — in the past four years, according to data The Post obtained through a Freedom of Information Law request.
For overall infractions, Metro-North suspended 129 employees and fired four in the same period. By comparison, the similarly sized Long Island Rail Road fired 12 employees and suspended 884 in the past four years.
The sole employee fired for safety reasons was Metro-North engineer Michael Martino, who was making $153,350 annually when he was canned in August 2009 for failing to test his brakes in Rye three weeks earlier.
Others were spared:
- Engineer Edgar Velloti also failed to run a proper brake test before leaving Stamford on April 12, 2010, but only received a 61-day suspension.
- Engineer Noel Blessing was slapped with a 30-day suspension last June for failing to comply with a stop signal in Grand Central Terminal in July 2012.
- Engineer Kenneth Dibble got a 45-day suspension in December 2011 for speeding and colliding with a “bumping block” in South Norwalk a year earlier.
The railroad was unapologetic about rehiring O’Brien. “Based on his 12 years of safe service to Conrail, and previous 11 years of safe service at Metro-North and its predecessors, we made a decision to rehire him,” Metro-North spokesman Aaron Donovan said.
The rehiring wouldn’t have happened at a stricter railroad, experts said.
Grady Cothen — a consultant and former Federal Railroad Administration top safety administrator — said a system like Norfolk Southern would have permanently banished an engineer for such an infraction.
“Good order and discipline are necessary in any organization where public safety is an issue,” he said. “Not every railroad takes the same approach to these sorts of things.”
The approach to discipline at Metro-North revolves around a lengthy adjudication process — first, there’s a hearing; then a review of the hearing transcript; a ruling from a hearing officer follows; then the accused can appeal to the railroad’s vice president of labor relations. If that doesn’t work, an appeal can be filed with the state Labor Department.
In the end, Metro-North — with 6,000 employees and 83 million annual riders — rarely fires unsafe staff. “A lot of it has to do with the contract that’s in place,” said Bill Henderson of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA. “The disciplinary process is an issue in contract negotiations.”
Jim Cameron, former chairman of the Connecticut Metro-North Rail Commuter Council, said his queries about staff violations were constantly rebuffed by Metro-North brass who called them “union and personnel matters.”
“The whole process is biased on the side of the union member,” he said. “Complaints fall into some black hole.” The union is the Association of Commuter Rail Employees.
Even the FRA doesn’t have a say in whether someone like O’Brien gets rehired.
“Railroad employee disciplinary actions are governed by Collective Bargaining Agreements under the Railway Labor Act, over which FRA has no regulatory authority or jurisdiction,” the agency said.
But Joseph Szabo, administrator of the FRA, blasted Metro North management for not instituting a confidential whistleblower policy.
“A [confidential close call reporting system] is in place on other rail lines across the country, including . . . commuter railroads, and has proven effective in identifying safety issues,” he wrote in a letter Tuesday to MTA Chairman Thomas Prendergast. “We have significant concerns about the current situation at Metro-North.”