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Malfunctioning rail-crossing arms reignite fears about high-speed trains in Lakewood

By Candice Ruud, The News Tribune
Published: March 19, 2018, 9:34am

TACOMA — Lakewood, a city bisected by railroad tracks, is wringing its hands over another train issue that officials say is a threat to public safety.

During the weekend of March 10-11, the crossing gates that prevent people from driving onto the tracks when a train is approaching malfunctioned. They simultaneously came down and stayed down for extended periods of time at two crossings on both that Saturday and Sunday.

In addition to long traffic back-ups in both directions, something else happened that alarmed several witnesses: People got out of their cars and manually lifted the crossing arms themselves to allow for cars to drive over the tracks.

“The Thorne Ln (sic) and Berkley (sic) railroad crossings are malfunctioning again today!!” read a post from a member of the Lakewood Life Facebook page on March 11. “People are holding them up (again) for people to get through. It’s so unsafe not being able to believe that when the crossarms are down there’s a train coming! Anyone know who to complain to about this?”

There were reports after the incident that dispatchers from an unknown agency told people that they could simply lift the malfunctioning arms and drive through, but those reports could not be verified.

“I heard people were told to do that, that dispatch received a message from one of the railroads to do that. Quite frankly, I thought that could not be true,” Lakewood city manager John Caulfield said last week. “However, that is true. Somebody from the railroad passed onto the 911 dispatch folks to let people know (to) go ahead and get out there in that area and lift the arms.”

South Sound 911 community relations manager Kris McNamar said the agency reviewed the audio and “found no instance in which any South Sound 911 employee advised anyone to lift crossing arms, though there were instances in which callers were provided words of caution against doing so.”

Sound Transit, which owns the rail line in that area, said it didn’t have any information about people being told to lift the arms.

“We had a component malfunction and when it malfunctioned it told the system that there was a falsely-detected presence of a train,” said Sound Transit spokesman Scott Thompson. “And so when that happens it defaults to safe mode, meaning the gates go down. We’ve made modifications now on that component and believe that’s going to fix the issue.”

Those two crossings are the main entrance and exit points for people living and working in the Tillicum neighborhood, which abuts American Lake. Drivers were stuck for over an hour on March 10 and about half an hour on March 11 before the problem was fixed, according to Thompson.

Witnesses said traffic backed up onto nearby Interstate 5. Some who called 911 said the lights and horns that announce a train’s arrival continued to blare. Had police been called into the neighborhood for an emergency during that time, they would have had to take a much longer route in, winding around back roads miles out of the way.

South Sound 911 received at least eight calls from motorists complaining about the problem across the weekend, and many reported that people were getting out of their cars and manually lifting the gates.

According to a call log entry from South Sound 911 on Saturday at 3:59 p.m., a Sound Transit dispatcher told South Sound 911 that it “probably just needs someone to lift an arm and they will deactivate, ongoing problem with this signal.”

In an interview, Sound Transit spokesman Thompson advised people not to do that and urged patience, saying the gates could be down because a train is coming.

“I understand people might get frustrated if there is a malfunction, but they could be down because they’re supposed to be down,” he said. “So we’d want everyone to be cautious and respect that the gates are down. If it’s a malfunction we’re going to get it fixed as quickly as we can. It’s better to be safe in all those instances.”

Caulfield said this isn’t the first time crossing arms have malfunctioned in Lakewood in recent memory. He said the crossing gates at almost all of the city’s seven at-grade rail crossings went down and stayed down during a weekday evening commute in October 2017.

“It created a huge mess of people trying to commute home, as well as backups onto I-5 … but it had a significant impact on public safety because officers were not able to move east to west,” he said.

Officers had to drive into Tacoma … and then come back down to address issues on the east and west side of the city.”

Caulfield and Lakewood Mayor Don Anderson are especially concerned about what will happen once the Amtrak Cascades line returns to its planned route through Lakewood, known as the Point Defiance Bypass. That new bypass route shaves six minutes off the trip from Seattle to Portland.

After the maiden voyage on that new route resulted in a deadly train derailment in December just south of Lakewood, the service has returned to its more scenic route around Point Defiance, at least for now.

Anderson and Lakewood officials long have been worried about the fast Amtrak trains coming through the city, and Lakewood unsuccessfully sued the state Department of Transportation in 2013 over safety concerns about the new route.

Washington Secretary of Transportation Roger Millar wrote in a February letter to Anderson that service will return to the route through Lakewood once a train speed governor known as Positive Train Control is fully operational.

“Positive Train Control is not yet activated for Amtrak Cascades trains on any section of the corridor from Vancouver, British Columbia to Eugene, Oregon,” Millar wrote on Feb. 20, in response to a letter from Anderson outlining his concerns about the high speed trains barreling through Lakewood.

“There have been more than 14 million boardings on Amtrak Cascades trains without a fatality incident, prior to the derailment. We have no reason to believe the Point Defiance Bypass is unsafe, either for our passengers or the communities along the route.”

Caulfield disagrees.

“The incidents that occurred on (March 10) and (March 11) are just what we believe are symptoms of a greater issue here and just the danger of having high-speed passenger rail come screaming through our community, which is a highly urbanized environment, at 79 mph in very close proximity to people’s homes, a hospital, elementary schools,” Caulfield said.

His worry is that if the signal malfunctions continue once the Amtrak trains are back to running more than a dozen trips a day through Lakewood, frustrated drivers might get out of their cars and do what they’ve been doing: approach the tracks to lift the crossing arms, not realizing a fast-moving train is headed their way.

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