23 June 2009
Blind Trust
(Metro Rail Crash 22 June 2009. Photo by Kristinashan)
We knew it was going to get worse when we turned it off to watch the re-run of he Vampire series on HBO. You can trust that part of things, that the story will get worse before it gets better.
There were six dead at that point, but the anchor breathlessly told us there would be more to come.
The initial report of the incident came while I was in the pool, since my commute is about seven minutes on a tough day, and I was in the water shortly after deciding to thrown in one towel and pick up another. It was a lovely day, winds from the north and low humidity.
My phone started bleeping plaintively on the white table under the yellow umbrella on the sunny side of the pool deck. I was close to the end of the work-out, so I let it ring and called back after I climbed out and started to dry off.
“Are you all right?”
I looked down and answered that I appeared to be. “What about The Intern?”
“Jogging, I think, saw her about an hour ago. Why?”
“There are two dead on the Metro. Are you sure?”
So that is when it started, and it is not going to end for months. The first thing you hear is always wrong, so I puzzled about what had happened on the fifty steps up the stairs to Tunnel Eight. The Metro is not a real transit system, like those in actual cities. It is a delicate sleek toy that serves some parts of our Potemkin urban sprawl with style.
Other parts it doesn’t, and forget about using it like a transit system on the off-peak hours; at ten or twelve minutes between trains, if you have to change lines from Orange to Red or Blue or heaven help us The Green, it is an interminable fraud.
Still, our arrangement with Metro is one of trust. There is no food or beverage on the trains, so it is almost always clean, and music is prohibited, and violence down below is relatively low.
Metro is safe. It is not like New York or Moscow or London, where the trains arrive inexorably every couple minutes.
There is a Stalinist imperative to those systems that is pretty amazing, and completely lacking here in Washington. There is time enough to fall off a platform and crawl back up, if necessary. You could trust the system to be slow enough to recover from about anything.
It may be slow in the off peak times, but at least it is expensive, too. There have been a few deaths in the thirty-three years the sleek Italian-made cars have been whizzing around town, but nothing catastrophic.
Not until rush-hour yesterday evening, which is when the compact of trust between us and the Metro ended.
The Intern got back from jogging and by the time we had confirmed that we had all our arms and limbs, the local television was having an orgy of coverage, and with so much unscripted air time, the ignorance of the on-air anchor people was painful to watch. The field reporters were a little better; they were there near the scene, and actually had something to say.
According to the video, one Metro train had apparently climbed atop another, slamming into it while the one was stopped near the Fort Totten. Thank God it was in an area where the track is outside and not in one of the tunnels under the city, or worse, under the River.
The violence of the encounter had apparently been sufficient that the offending train had split itself the heavy wheels and undercarriage slicing off and catapulting the aluminum superstructure of the lead two cars up above the last two of the stationary train.
By the time you read this you will, of course, know more than I do. That is the nature of the coverage of these things. Mayor Adrian Fenty, the charismatic young man who runs the town, is pretty media savvy, and is getting some good face time. He gravely informed us that rail traffic would be affected all up and down the East Coast. He also mentioned that the death toll has risen to nine as the cars were cut apart, and more than seventy were injured in the mishap.
That is probably the last we will hear of the truth for a while. The Intern thinks it might have been suicide by the operator, since there was a quarter mile of clear track ahead, plenty of warning devices and the weather fair and unblemished.
It is sort of like the economy; we didn’t know who was driving when we went off the tracks. We just trusted in the system. I was listening to some government idiot explaining why high-speed rail was the answer to not only our travel but our economic problems. The official was as vacuous as the television anchors.
“City center to city center! No airports1 And you don’t have to take your shoes off in security! There is no security!”
Moron.
Anyway, whether it is the driver’s fault or not, blaming her certainly is convenient. He can’t talk back. It is like the Airbus people blaming icing pitot tubes on the Air France jet for the crash over the Atlantic that probably snapped its vertical stabilizer in the thunderstorms over the Atlantic. There are no survivors, and it is better to blame a sensor than the structural integrity of a jet fleet that we all use with blind trust.
Of course, it could be the Boeing people who are spreading the story. I am no structural engineer, and have no independent testing facilities for composite structures at Big Pink. I still trust the way the Americans put their airplanes together, and am more confident in graphite as the material for a golf-club shaft than an aircraft tail.
We take a lot on faith these days. I thought about that accelerating out of the airport renta-car the other day. Well, you must do what you must do.
Accordingly, I am adopting a position of “If it’s not Boeing, I’m not Going.”
And as for the train, I am going to wait for things to settle down a little before I go back underground.
Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com