NTSB: Amtrak’s lax safety culture led to crash that killed 2
PHILADELPHIA — Amtrak’s safety culture suffered major lapses, including more than two dozen unsafe conditions at a work zone where a train slammed into a maintenance backhoe last year, killing two workers, federal investigators said Tuesday.
Chief among them, investigators said, were a foreman’s failure to make sure dispatchers were still rerouting trains from the area under repair near Philadelphia and the crew’s failure to use a device that would have automatically blocked access to those tracks.
“Had any of these issues been addressed, the accident may have been prevented or the severity mitigated,” National Transportation Safety Board investigator Joe Gordon said at a public meeting on the crash at the agency’s Washington headquarters.
The April 2016 crash killed backhoe operator Joseph Carter Jr. and supervisor Peter Adamovich. About 40 passengers on the New York to Savannah, Georgia, train were injured.