TTC board asks auditor to review SRT derailment
Union questions maintenance levels prior to 2023 crash
The TTC board has asked the city’s auditor general to investigate the derailment of the Scarborough RT last summer, after the transit agency and its biggest union presented widely different views of safety practices on the now-defunct line on Thursday.
The debate focused on consultant reports commissioned by the TTC last year, which sounded alarms about the state of the RT before the accident, noting an unexplained drop in reported defects on the part of the line that failed, among other things.
At the TTC board meeting Thursday, the president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113 accused the TTC of covering up safety issues, after the transit agency released a report last week saying that the SRT’s track had become more reliable in the lead-up to its derailment in July.
“The public sees and understands how underfunding and mismanagement has made the (TTC) system unreliable and unsafe. The SRT derailment was just a symptom of the larger underlying problem,” said Marvin Alfred, whose Local 113 represents more than 12,000 Toronto transit workers.
On July 24, 2023, faulty reaction rail anchor bolts caused the SRT to derail, sending five people to hospital and shutting the aging transit line four months ahead of schedule.
“For years, and particularly under the current leadership, the scale of the problem has been hidden from the TTC board and the public,” Alfred said. “It’s pure luck that nobody died.”
“This incident serves as a sobering reminder of the importance of replacing systems and infrastructure when they reach the end of their life cycle,” said TTC CEO Rick Leary on Thursday, reiterating previous warnings about the need for upgrades and new trains on the TTC’s aging Line 2.
“Safety is, and always has been, a top concern of this organization and this board,” Leary said, which is why the TTC immediately retained the external consultants.
“We now know what happened and we also know the infrastructure that failed that evening was unique on the SRT and not found anywhere else on our system.”
But those consultant reports raised questions about the state of the RT before the crash. In particular, the union and the TTC disagreed on the reasoning behind one of the consultants’ core findings: that there had been a dramatic drop in reported defects on the reaction rail in the years leading up to the accident.
A review by Systra Canada found there were just 16 and 14 reported defects in 2023 and 2022, compared to more than 125 defects annually between 2018 and 2021.
The TTC said that was because there were fewer defects on the track, due to the successful execution of the SRT life extension program and other maintenance, according to a recent report.
However, at Thursday’s board meeting, Ian Fellows, ATU Local 113’s legal counsel, said the system had not become more reliable, and that the TTC had made certain changes that made problems harder to uncover.
For example, in the past, the reaction rail was painted so that it was obvious when a train undercarriage came in contact with the rail, Fellows said. In the last few years, the TTC stopped painting that rail.
“It meant it was harder for the patrollers to find the defects,” he said.
Another worrying finding in the Systra report was a “reduction in preventative maintenance” on the RT after its closure date was announced, which on Thursday the TTC said was due to differing definitions of what qualified as preventative maintenance.
To investigate this inconsistency, as well as broader systemic issues behind the derailment, the board voted unanimously on a motion by Coun. Josh Matlow to put the matter in front of the city’s auditor general.
Last week, transit advocacy group TTCriders wrote to auditor Tara Anderson asking her to assess whether the TTC properly maintained the aging RT before it derailed, and whether the transit agency was transparent with the public about the accident, citing a potential “breach of public trust.”
Fort Monaco, the TTC’s chief of operations and infrastructure, said many of the recommendations that came from the consultant reports were already underway before the SRT derailed, such as modernizing the subway track maintenance.
“That all said, this incident has allowed us to discover a critical shortcoming in an asset believed to be in good overall condition when in fact it was not.”