Montgomery County firefighters test their radios in the Metro tunnel that runs underneath Bethesda every two weeks and the most recent tests show they’re working well.
The tests are done to ensure firefighters have working lines of communication in the underground tunnels and station. Communication failures are believed to have played a role in slowing the rescue efforts during the fatal incident involving smoke near the L’Enfant Metro station in January.
Battalion Chief Michael Baltrotsky, a communications specialist for the Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Services, said Friday that firefighters test their radios from inside the tunnel and on station platforms to ensure they can communicate with officials above ground.
“Last time we tested down there the radio communications were absolutely fine,” Baltrotsky said. Radio communications tested in the last two weeks at the Bethesda, Medical Center and Friendship Heights stations were “perfect,” he said.
“We’ve had issues in the past in every underground station, but when we find them, we address them with [the Washington Metro Area Transit Authority] and they fix them very quickly,” Baltrotsky said. “We haven’t found major problems in Bethesda for a while.”
A Washington Post article published online Thursday detailed how a multi-million dollar alarm system designed to warn first responders of outages in the Metro system’s radio network does not work.
The alarm system cost $2 million in federal funds to install, but was not reliable and was expensive to maintain, so Metro officials turned it off, according to a Metro spokesman who was cited in the Post report.
“To know that that system hasn’t been alarmed in years basically means we’ve been living on borrowed time,” Baltrotsky said in the Post report. Baltrotsky is also a member of the region’s subcommittee on fire communications.
On Friday, he said the alarm system was designed to tell Metro employees if there’s something wrong with a piece of equipment, such as one of the antennas that are used as relays to distribute radio communication from tunnels and platforms to radios above ground.
“The alarm system is that missing link to tell us something is wrong,” Baltrotsky said. “That’s why I send someone down every two weeks to test the radios.”
The inability for first responders to communicate effectively with each other was identified as a significant problem that factored into the January incident near the L’Enfant Metro station in which more than 80 people were injured and an Alexandria woman was killed after smoke filled a train stopped in atunnel. District firefighters said problems related to their radios’ encryption kept their communications from traveling on Metro’s radio relay equipment that lines the tunnels and platforms.
Preliminary findings reported by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) attributed the smoke to an arcing insulator incident, in which debris or water contacts the subway’s electrified third rail and causes smoke.
The same type of incidents are prevalent in the Bethesda tunnel between the Friendship Heights and Medical Center stations. In an October report, Metro wrote that leaks in this tunnel cause “one third of Metro’s arcing insulators.”
“Since Metro opened the Bethesda and Medical Center stations in 1984, water infiltration in this section of the Red Line has caused operation disruptions and has required extensive maintenance over the years to control it,” wrote Metro officials in the report. “The tunnel requires ongoing pumping, dredging and cleaning to keep switches in service and to prevent arcing insulators.”
On Feb. 11, NTSB issued a series of findings about the fatal L’Enfant incident, including that ventilation fans were activated that sucked the smoke into the train and that tunnel fans blowing inward, rather than exhausting, kept a plume of smoke floating in the tunnel. The NTSB reported that the fans drawing air from the smoky tunnel into the train were not shut off by the train’s operator.
Metro responded to the findings by saying it has inspected and tested tunnel fans since the accident and completed additional employee training on how to use the fans.
Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service spokesman Pete Piringer said in an interview with Bethesda Beat shortly after the L’Enfant incident that it’s often difficult for firefighters to find the source of smoke inside the Metro tunnel in Bethesda and to remove it quickly.
“Often you just have it linger, which is a major hassle,” Piringer said.
Interim Fire and Rescue Service Chief Scott Goldstein briefed Montgomery County Council members on Jan. 29 about Metro safety issues. Goldstein told the council that firefighters are often unsure of the nature of problems inside the Metro tunnel and will often wait for Metro experts to arrive before they respond to an incident.
He also said that because the tunnels are 200 feet below ground, communication can be a problem.
The alarm system designed to alert first responders to outages in radio communications was just one of many designed to improve the radio network inside Metro tunnels, according to the Post. It was funded through an $11 million grant from the Department of Homeland Security, the newspaper said.
