Albuquerque Journal

Crashes blamed on sleep disorder

Lack of testing for sleep apnea cited as primary cause of 2 train wrecks

- ASSOCIATED PRESS

A lack of adequate testing for a pernicious sleep disorder was the primary cause of two serious train crashes in New Jersey and New York, federal investigat­ors concluded in a report Tuesday as they renewed the call for the testing to be mandatory.

The crashes involving a New Jersey Transit train at the Hoboken terminal in September 2016 and a Long Island Rail Road train in Brooklyn in January 2017 killed one person, injured more than 200 and caused more than $11 million in damage.

In both instances, the train engineers were found to have suffered from undiagnose­d sleep apnea, a condition connected to obesity that robs sufferers of sleep and contribute­s to daytime drowsiness.

The NTSB blamed New Jersey Transit for not following its sleep apnea guidelines and blamed the Long Island Rail Road for not having testing in place before the accidents. It also blamed the Federal Railroad Administra­tion for not making sleep apnea testing mandatory.

Last year, the FRA abandoned plans to require the testing as part of President Donald Trump’s effort to reduce federal regulation­s, instead leaving it up to individual rail operators. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, both Democrats, countered the Republican president’s move by introducin­g legislatio­n that would force the testing to be mandatory.

In the Brooklyn and Hoboken crashes, neither engineer could remember his train accelerati­ng as it approached the station and smashed into the end of the tracks.

In the Hoboken crash, a woman standing on the platform was killed by falling debris.

“The public deserves alert operators. That’s not too much to ask,” National Transporta­tion Safety Board Chairman Robert Sumwalt said Tuesday.

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 Railroad commuter train that sped through a curve and crashed in New York in 2013, killing four people.

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