Long list: Questions over tragedy building, Joanne Chianello writes,
One thing is certain: if city had built an underpass, bus would not have hit train
The list of questions we want answered in the wake of this week’s tragic accident is growing longer by the day.
There is, of course, the overarching one about what exactly went wrong on the fateful morning when an OC Transpo bus travelling north on Woodroffe Avenue hit a Via Rail passenger train, resulting in six deaths.
One possibility was crossed off on Friday afternoon when the Transportation Safety Board investigators said they found nothing wrong with the train or the track.
That was an easy one. No one really believed that a train malfunction was the cause of Wednesday morning’s crash near the Fallowfield transit station.
All week we’ve been hearing from witnesses that the gates blocking cars from driving across the tracks were down across Woodroffe and the adjacent Transitway. A number of passengers on the Route 76 bus said driver Dave Woodard smashed through the barrier.
And so now our attention turns to the bus: Was there a problem with the brakes on the double-decker? Did Woodard have a medical emergency that caused him not to stop? Could it have been driver error?
These are the difficult issues investigators will be grappling with over the coming weeks, maybe months. We can only hope the probe will produce some definitive answers.
But a little further down the list, under all these pressing and obvious questions about what happened on the bus, we’re adding increasingly troubling queries of our own about the perceived long-term safety of allowing vehicles to cross those railway tracks at grade level.
Two different rail companies — one as recently as three years ago — recommended that vehicles pass either under or over the train. Why wasn’t that advice followed?
As the Citizen’s David Reevely has reported, Canadian National, which owned the track until just a few years ago, “would not permit permanent at-grade crossings at Fallowfield Road and Woodroffe Avenue,” according to a 2001 letter CN wrote to the city.
Why? The amount of crosstrack traffic led CN to have “current and future safety concerns.”
And now we discover that Via also shared that concern. In 2010, Via took over that piece of track from CN, and commissioned a safety assessment report on the crossing.
In the “comments and recommendations” section, the report’s authors state that the volume of traffic suggests the need for an underpass. A “requirement for grade separation,” should be “re-evaluated” by the city, the report says.
You don’t have to be an engineer or statistician to figure out that the more traffic there is, the higher the chance of a crash. Clearly, that’s why the rail companies prefer to build a grade-separated crossing when traffic tops a certain level. Amazingly, Transport Canada doesn’t seem to have any guidelines with regard to traffic volume and grade-separated crossings. It is left up to rail companies and municipalities to sort out some sort of safe option. And to be clear, all the rules seem to have been followed.
But we know only part of the story.
When the city went to build the underpass around 2001, officials realized the soil under the tracks was “not suitable,” in the words of one engineer. The cost of building an underpass beneath Woodroffe and the train tracks would have topped $100 million, instead of the planned $40 million. An overpass was apparently even more problematic.
Many may not realize that it’s the municipality’s responsibility — perhaps unfairly — to come up with most of the money for these kinds of rail crossings, so the huge jump in price was a problem for the city.
However, a city report from August 2004 indicates that municipal officials persuaded CN to change its mind. The rail company was now willing to allow an at-grade crossing.
Why the change of heart about safety issues on CN’s part? We don’t know. CN has yet to respond to repeated requests by the Citizen on this question.
Nor do we know how or if Via followed up on its 2010 report that also raised concerns about the traffic volume at that crossing.
It’s possible the underpass couldn’t have been built at all. That August 2004 city document references “detailed geotechnical sub-surface investigations” that showed a “conventional open-cut underpass option should be abandoned due to an unacceptable risk of catastrophic failure and possible severe impact on houses in Barrhaven.”
That report, though, was not immediately available. (City officials say they are retrieving it from their archives). But a subsequent city-commissioned report from Jockvale Valley Engineering dated October 2004 makes no mention of any “risk of catastrophic failure,” only how expensive an underpass would be.
So many unanswered questions, so many uncomfortable ones to be asked in the aftermath of this week’s horrific crash.
Among them is this: If the city had built an underpass at the Woodroffe crossing — as two different rail companies have recommended — would six people be dead today? Because while a grade separation could not have prevented whatever happened on the bus on Wednesday, one thing is certain: the bus would not have hit an oncoming train.