Metro officials are planning to install rollback protection on trains within the next year due to last year's collision in which a train rolled backward for 78 seconds and slammed into another train, according to Metro spokeswoman Candace Smith.
The operator of the runaway train at the Woodley Park Station in November 2004 failed to break because he was probably asleep, federal safety officials said last week.
According to Smith, over half of Metro's fleet doesn't have rollback protection. "[However,] a good chunk will be installed within the next two years on about 300 trains," she said.
According to Smith, several hundred trains have been in use since the Metro system opened 30 years ago.
"The big question is looking at the cost of all this," Smith said. "Is it worth making the changes or retiring old cars? The cost of this could be well over $2 million."
The National Transportation Safety Board has probable cause that the train operator had dozed off, according to Smith.
Claudia Imel, a junior in the School of Communication, was on the subway when the collision happened in 2004.
"I was on one of the trains behind the accident," she said. "I was thankful, if I had arrived at the Metro five minutes earlier, I would have been in the accident."
Metro officials detained Imel and other passengers and then she was free to go.
"I'm not scared to ride the Metro, but a bit wary due to lack of security," she said.
The crash, which occurred in the middle of the day, injured approximately 20 people and caused about $3.5 million in damage, according to Washingtonpost.com. It hindered operations on the Red Line, the system's busiest route, for days.
Most of the students here are completely at the mercy of the Metro, so line delays have unfortunately become a part of daily life," said Hillary Hippert, a freshman in the School of International Service. "Whether it's due to running only one side of the tracks or experiencing trains inexplicably stopping between stations for varying intervals, it's especially difficult to know how much time I should plan to spend on the Metro on any given day."
No one was killed in the crash, but investigators calculated that at least 79 would have died if the runaway train had been full of passengers, The Washington Post reported last week.
"The only thing that kept this accident from being catastrophic was the time of day that it occurred," said Debbie Hersman, a member of the NTSB.
Metro is constantly making changes to its safety, according to Smith. The NTSB is working to make the Metro the safest in the world.
"We take their suggestions very seriously," Smith said. "We do all we can to implement what they say"
