David L. Mayer knew the challenge when he accepted the position of chief executive at the Washington Metrorail Safety Commission, created by Congress in 2017 to monitor and oversee Metro safety after years of lapses that culminated with the death of a passenger from smoke inhalation in 2015.
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The rail industry veteran, who previously served as chief safety officer for the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority, became fond of the Washington region — and Metro — after moving to the District in 1991 for a job at the National Transportation Safety Board, where he rose to become managing director.
While the commission has issued several orders and safety audits, no action came close to the one issued Oct. 17, when Mayer ordered Metro to pull all 748 of its 7000-series trains from service, suspending about 60 percent of the transit agency’s fleet. The move reverberated across the region, creating lengthy waits as more people begin to resume normal routines amid the pandemic.
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Mayer spoke to The Washington Post about that decision and the federal investigation into a rare defect involving several 7000-series rail cars.
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Q. I know that you do not know when the 7000 series might come back into service, but eventually, they will be back, right?
A. That’s certainly my expectation, completely. Yes.
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Q: You’ve said the defect plaguing 7000-series trains is unusual, and engineers and rail accident investigators have told us the same. Could the widening of the wheels be a problem with the metal?
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A: Any opinion I offered would just be speculation, and that’s never helpful. But I would say that I suspect that the mechanism is complicated. It’s not something simple. It probably is not just one thing. That’s one of the reasons that the investigation led by the NTSB is going to study so many different aspects, not just the composition of the metal, the hardness of the metal or just the factors that are present on a rail car, but they’ll also look at any Metro-unique aspects. Any aspects of Metro’s operation or tracks that might have a role to play here. We could get lucky and discover that it has a simple single-factor cause, which might be easy to remediate. But my guess is that it’s going to be a complex interaction that has to be addressed.
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Q. The Oct. 14 Blue Line derailment led to the NTSB investigation and the revelation that wheels on 7000-series rail cars had widened outward on more than 50 axles since 2017. You learned of the scope of the problem and ordered Metro to pull all of the cars out of service, knowing that might create a major train shortage. How did you come to such a decision?
A: Did I understand that this was a momentous decision? Absolutely, yes. Decisions like this sometimes need to be arrived at very quickly. When I woke up on Saturday, Oct. 16, I had no idea we were going to be issuing any order the next day, much less an order that was taking a large swath of Metro rail cars out of service. I believe it was 30 years ago when I moved to this region, in large part because of the Metrorail system and my appreciation for the role transportation plays in so many lives. So yes, I fully appreciated that it would be the biggest decision to date from the Washington Metrorail Safety Commission. But I would say there was no doubt in my mind that it was the right thing to do and that it was necessary to ensure safety for the traveling public.
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Q. Many people, from members of Congress to Metro riders, don’t understand how Metro did not report the defects to your commission despite them appearing over four years. Metro’s general manager and its board said they also were not aware. Should they have known about it?
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A: It’s a hypothetical question, and it’s hard to answer. Would I expect to know about something like this? Yes. I mean that in the sense of whether I’m the CEO of the safety commission or the chief safety officer at the MTA in New York. Would I expect to know about a condition that could potentially lead to a derailment or something that the chair of the NTSB called a potential “catastrophic event”? Yes, I would expect to know about it. That’s my role, whether I’m the chief safety officer of a property or whether I am the head of a safety oversight body.
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Q: How would you fix this gap in reporting critical information?
A: There’s probably nothing that would be automatic, like a data-entry mechanism, that would just escalate a concern automatically. It would require some human judgment that there was a safety concern and an issue that needed to be escalated. In this specific case, we understand that Metro was working actively with the car builder [Kawasaki Rail Car] to address the situation. And so that suggests that Metro knew they had something that needed to be addressed. Certainly, a widening wheel gauge problem is something that anybody who works in rail would understand is something that could lead to a derailment. So in this specific case, I think the information was being gathered and was being collected and the judgment was there that something critical to safety was going on. I would have expected this to be escalated both within Metro and to Metro’s safety oversight body.
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Q: How hands-on are you and the safety commission in monitoring Metro?
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A: There are ways in which we’re hands-on by attending regularly scheduled meetings and having regularly scheduled interactions with Metro at every level of the organization. But there are also ways in which we do our work without a lot of warning before we knock on the door. For instance, on the morning after we were certified [as a regulatory agency], we arrived unannounced at Metro’s rail operations control center to conduct inspections and observations that started at six o’clock that morning. We’ve continued that tradition of going to construction sites and other operational activities, either with or without announcements to make sure that we — with or without advance warning — get to see the actual performance of the system.
Q: In the last decade or so, has there been one significant issue or solution that has heavily impacted rail safety?
A: If you look at the body of NTSB reports over the last 10, maybe even 20 years, in rail transportation and really in transportation in general, there are a couple of unique human causes for accidents that I think really, really are important for everyone to take notice of, and those relate to human fatigue and distraction. We are all humans and we are all prone to the performance decrements of fatigue. I’m thinking of just our basic biological need for sleep, and when we don’t get the sleep that we need — either because of our work hours, our personal commitments or a medical condition that might keep us from getting the sleep that we need — we are not performing as safely and optimally as we could. The other thing is distraction. We live in a world that has an extraordinary amount of information and information sources. We almost all have smartphones and social media and multiple email accounts and even multiple phone numbers today. So it’s just really, really important to not fall into the trap.
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Q: Metro restricts train operators from using phones, right?
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A: Well, as a result of our oversight, Metro has strengthened its policies. But I think in that regard, it’s a yes-and-no question. A train operator is not permitted to have a phone powered on during operation. But like all rail transit or rail operators in general, it’s enforcement that is not perfect. And that’s not just for Metro. That’s just a statement of the reality.
Q: How did you get into this line of work and to where you are now?
A: I’ve always been interested in transportation safety, and I’ve always been interested in transportation and in doing that safely. I remember when I was in college, an airplane crash occurred in a nearby city. I just remember the chaos that it brought and the confusion and the extraordinary ability of the NTSB back in that time to make sense and order out of that chaos and explain what occurred, and change the industry as a direct result.
I had the great fortune to work my way through all sorts of different responsibilities over 23 years at the NTSB. It’s been a fabulous learning experience and a great personal and professional opportunity. And for those reasons, I thought that I was pretty well-suited coming to this role as the CEO of the safety commission, and I was very lucky that the commissioners apparently agreed.