METRO fires train operator
KHOU-11's Jason Whitely reports that METRO has fired train operator LaShonda Gordon following a wrong-track incident in May:
Gordon is telling her story here for the first time.
“I blew my horn,” she remembered. “He gave me a proceed sign to come through and I did. I crossed over from Track 1 to Track 2 and I thought ‘I don’t remember getting a command to crossover.’”
She didn’t get one.
As 11 News first reported, a crew was working on the switch and mistakenly left it open causing Gordon’s northbound light rail train, carrying 180 passengers, to move over to the southbound track.
“I’m trying to call on the radio but there were a lot of people on the radio at this time,” Gordon recalled as soon as she crossed over. “I don’t know who was talking or what but I couldn’t get through. So I called them on my cell phone.”
Her personal cell phone, a pink Sanyo, is how Metro found out.
When our story prompted the transit agency to call a news conference on May 21, Metro bragged its redundant safety procedures prevented disaster.
Not true.
Gordon’s call evidently did.
The switch crew didn’t realize the mistake, neither did the flagger and the Metro controller at Transtar never noticed the train on the wrong track.
Of all those people, LaShonda Gordon, the only one to apparently recognize the problem, was also the only one fired.
Just another METRO fiasco. Nothing to see here (say the METRO PR folks), move along.
The Chronicle's Rad Sallee reports on the firing here.
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Posted by Kevin Whited @ 06/21/07 10:20 PM | Houston Transit | Print | Comments (19)
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