‘Train apnea’ again
LIRR derail the 3rd in three years
Could sleep apnea be the cause of three recent local train crashes?
That’s what investigators are now considering as they mull the possibility that the engineer at the controls of the Long Island Rail Road train that crashed in Brooklyn Wednesday suffers from the ailment.
He would be the third local train-derailment operator in a little more than three years to be diagnosed with apnea, which involves poor breathing during sleep at night that can lead to “excessive daytime sleepiness,” according to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.
After Wednesday’s crash, which left more than 100 injured at the Atlantic Terminal, the driver “was unable to recall striking the end of the track,” National Transportation Safety Board investigator Ted Turpin said at a press conference Thursday.
“He does recall entering the station and controlling the speed of the train, but the next thing he recalls was after the collision.”
The train approached the station at normal speed at about 8:20 a.m., an NTSB source said. But in the three minutes before the crash, it kept changing speeds, going as slow as 2 mph and as fast as 10 mph in a 5-mph zone, the source said. It crashed into the bumper block at the end of Track 6 at 10 mph.
The 50-year-old engineer, who was hired by the LIRR in 1999, says he can’t remember the impact, but is certain he was not using his cellphone at the time, Turpin said.
Investigators are looking into whether the engineer, who is overweight, suffers from apnea, as did a MetroNorth engineer who fell asleep at the controls of his train in The Bronx in December 2013, an NTSB source said. The resulting derailment killed four people and injured dozens more.
The engineer of a New Jersey Transit train that barreled into Hoboken Terminal last September, killing a woman in the station, also suffered from sleep apnea.
Turpin added that the LIRR engineer had just returned to work after a three-day break.