It’s a disaster waiting to happen.
NYC Transit supervisors falsified thousands of vital signal inspections across the subway system for years, leaving straphangers at risk for deadly collisions like the one that killed nine people in Washington, D.C., The Post has learned.
Across every line in every borough, a cabal of managers in the signal department forced maintainers to fib on the inspections by threatening them with punishment like loss of overtime, according to a sweeping investigation by the MTA Inspector General.
At least one high-level chief, Tracy Bowdwin — the MTA’s highest earning signal department supervisor at $165,000-a-year — was demoted in the fallout, and managers are still being questioned, transit sources said.
The callous practice was in response to ramped up pressure from the MTA to meet federal standards that call for railway switches and signals to be inspected monthly, sources said.
“Instead of five signals to inspect, they would give you 15. There’s no way 15 could done, but they would say, ‘You had to do it,’¤” one signal maintainer said of the overzealous bosses. “It’s like, you think your car is fine after going to the mechanic, but they never looked at it.”
Signal maintainers would routinely enter false inspection into their logbooks, which managers used to write reports. In some cases, managers would write a bogus report even if a worker refused to enter the fudged data in their books.
Workers who didn’t comply lost overtime privileges or got sent to the dirtiest, most leak-infested tunnels, sources said.
The MTA has thousands of signals across the transit system — and a false green can lead to potentially deadly rear-end collisions. The greatest risk is along the L-line, where trains are operated robotically and there are fewer fail-safes than other lines to prevent crashes.
A signal malfunction sparked the fatal June 2009 commuter rail crash in Washington, where a Metro train crashed into the back of another.
A signal maintainer makes a base salary of about $60,000 a year — with the highest overtime earners bumping it as high as $127,000 per year, according to MTA records. The managers, who don’t earn overtime, make up to $165,000 a year.
Falsification of records is a felony offense, though it’s unclear if these workers will face criminal charges.
Although the investigation is not yet complete, transit workers have been ordered to comb over all the signals, said MTA Inspector General Barry Kluger.