NTSB: Engineers in two crashes had sleep apnea
The engineers of two commuter trains that slammed into New York City-area stations in the last year — killing one person and injuring more than 200 others — were both suffering from undiagnosed sleep apnea and have no memory of the crashes, according to investigative documents made public Thursday.
Both trains were going more than double the speed limit and crashed at stations that had been exempted from federal regulations requiring automatic speed controls that could have slowed or stopped them.
The National Transportation Safety Board said the common circumstances of the Sept. 29, 2016, New Jersey Transit crash in Hoboken, N.J., and the Jan. 4, 2017, Long Island Rail Road crash in Brooklyn warranted combining findings and recommendations in a single report to be released early next year.
The 2,500 pages of documents released Thursday, including medical reports and interviews, offer a glimpse into what investigators have learned, but don’t include conclusions on the causes.
The findings reignited the debate over testing for the disorder in train engineers, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., pushing for government-mandated screenings. Schumer called the Trump administration’s decision last month to abandon a testing requirement “unconscionable.”
Sleep apnea is especially troubling in the transportation industry because sufferers are repeatedly awakened as their airway closes and their breathing stops, leading to dangerous daytime drowsiness.
The NTSB has cited sleep apnea in the probable cause of 10 highway and rail accidents in the past 17 years, including an undiagnosed case in the engineer of a Metro-North commuter train that sped into a 30 mph curve at 82 mph and crashed in New York City in 2013, killing four people.
The Hoboken and Brooklyn engineers both had the sleep apnea risk factor of being morbidly obese, but weren’t diagnosed with the disorder until after the crashes, according to the NTSB documents. NJ Transit had a screening program at the time of the Hoboken crash. The LIRR’s started after the Brooklyn crash. Both engineers are now being treated with pressurized breathing masks.
NJ Transit engineer Thomas Gallagher — 6foot and 322 pounds around the time of the crash — told investigators he only remembered looking at his watch and the speedometer and activating the horn and bell before his packed rushhour train slammed into Hoboken Terminal. Gallagher, then 48, told investigators the next thing he remembered was a “loud bang.”
A conductor standing on a platform told investigators he couldn’t see the engineer through the cab window as the train rumbled into the station at more than double the 10 mph speed limit, indicating Gallagher may have slumped down or fallen.
Falling debris from the impact killed a woman standing on a platform.