California train agency fined $650,000 for deaths

SAN FRANCISCO — Regulators fined the San Francisco Bay Area’s transit agency $650,000 on Thursday for safety failures that led a commuter train to strike and kill two workers inspecting track five years ago during a union strike. The California Public Utilities Commission also placed the Bay Area Rapid Transit agency on three years of probation. The commission said the fine would double if BART commits any safety violations during that period.

BART spokeswoman Alicia Trost said the agency was reviewing the decision, which nearly triples a $220,000 fine ordered by a judge last year. BART and staff members of the commission’s Safety and Enforcement Division both appealed the judge’s order to the five-member commission.

Commissioner Liane M. Randolph said regulators increased the fine because the safety failures were “egregious” and BART’s response to the investigation was inadequate.

“BART’s degree of wrongdoing, particularly the safety rule violations discussed above, are most troubling,” Randolph wrote in the decision.

Randolph noted that BART was more than 16 months late in producing its accident report and its “corrective-action plan” was only two pages long and submitted four years after the accident.

Trost said BART has spent $2 million upgrading its safety barrier and plans an additional $4 million in improvements. She said the agency has overhauled its safety policies since the accident.