Lawyers Cite Fatigue in Fatal Placentia Rail Crash

A freight train conductor blamed for a crash that killed three Metrolink passengers and injured more than 260 in Placentia three years ago was tired after weeks of long hours and erratic sleep, attorneys say, citing sworn statements taken for dozens of lawsuits.

Although the conductor, in his deposition, said fatigue had nothing to do with the accident, attorneys say it could be an important factor in the crash as well as in their bid to win millions of dollars in punitive damages from Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp.

The attorneys, who represent the injured Metrolink passengers, cite the sworn depositions of conductor Dean E. Tacoronte, 41, and engineer Darrell W. Wells, 51. Both were fired by Burlington Northern, which blamed their inattentiveness for the accident in which their mile-long freight train plowed head-on into a stopped Metrolink train the morning of April 23, 2002.

“Me and Darrell, we were both tired that day,” Tacoronte said in his deposition. He had worked 29 days straight in the weeks before the crash. “We were real, real busy.... I worked all the time.”

“Turning and burning,” was how he described his routine.

Attorneys say the statements of Tacoronte and, to a lesser extent, Wells bolster the lawyers’ assertions that Burlington Northern should pay punitive damages for company practices that regularly put tired crews at the controls of freight trains.

The attorneys’ views differ from the October 2003 findings of the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigated the accident.

The board concluded that Wells and Tacoronte had been talking about nonwork matters when they failed to heed a yellow warning signal requiring them to slow down and prepare to stop at the next signal.

The investigators found no evidence that fatigue, alcohol, drugs or problems with the signals contributed to the crash.

Board officials say they can’t comment on pending lawsuits, but that the board can reconsider its findings on accidents if new information surfaces.

Lawyers representing the injured passengers contend that fatigue is one reason why the crew was distracted while traveling through the sequence of warning signals they were familiar with.

Crew fatigue is a safety problem that has long plagued the railroad industry despite decades of effort to reduce it. Industry experts say that because of long hours and constantly varying starting times, engineers and conductors often don’t get much sleep, which can lead to lapses in judgment and slow reaction times while at the controls of locomotives.

“This is more than one person making one simple mistake,” said Wylie Aiken, a Santa Ana attorney working on the case. “There are things that should have been anticipated and stopped by Burlington Northern.”

More than 150 lawsuits were filed against the railroad company after the crash; most were settled before trial.

Burlington Northern, which has admitted its liability, has paid more than $16.2 million in damages.

Aiken, who is coordinating the lawsuits for a group of attorneys, said about 65 cases remained open. They await trial to determine the amount of damages to be paid to the crash victims. About 35 are seeking additional punitive damages from Burlington Northern, he said.

Tacoronte, in his lengthy deposition late last year, said the company did not assess whether engineers and conductors were fatigued before they began work.

He and Wells also said that because Burlington Northern required crews to be available to work 75% of the time, engineers and conductors routinely worked long hours for weeks in a row.

A spokeswoman for Burlington Northern declined to comment on the lawsuits, saying company officials may not discuss pending litigation.

Before the crash, Burlington Northern, one of the nation’s largest railroads, adopted several measures to help reduce fatigue. Options include work-rest cycles, such as a three-day weekend after working seven days and the ability to request up to 14 hours of rest if a crew member feels too tired to work.

In its defense, Burlington Northern is expected to partly rely on the transportation safety board’s findings that fatigue played no part in the accident and that the crew misread the two warning signals.

Tacoronte told investigators that the first warning signal in question was green -- meaning all clear. Both Tacoronte and Wells said they could not see the next signal, which was red, until they were 400 feet away -- too late to stop. Transportation safety board officials, however, say the final signal is visible from about 2,400 feet.

Wells also told crash investigators that the first warning signal was green, but later said he never saw it and relied on Tacoronte’s word.

As a safety precaution, railroad regulations require the engineer and conductor to observe signals and call them out to each other.

Tacoronte says fatigue did not impair his ability to clearly determine the signal’s color.

“I was tired,” he said in an interview with The Times. “There have been times I would fall asleep on trains and not even know it. But I observed the signal and saw what I saw. I am not wrong.”

“Employees, when they are constantly tired, often don’t know whether they are coming or going,” said R. Edward Pfiester Jr., a veteran attorney who specializes in railroad matters and is representing about a dozen of the injured passengers in their lawsuits.

Sleep experts who have studied fatigue in transportation say that some of the last people to know whether they are impaired by the lack of sleep are those with fatiguing work schedules.

According to his deposition, the evening before the crash, Tacoronte stayed at a San Bernardino hotel with his wife, whom he saw infrequently because of his work schedule and the fact that their home was in Needles, near the Arizona border. He said he had virtually no sleep before going into work.

At 11:30 p.m., he was told to report to work in Los Angeles three hours sooner than expected. After reporting at 2:30 a.m., his train’s departure was delayed almost five hours, during which time he took a 90-minute nap in the cab of the locomotive. He told Wells he was “really tired.”

Tacoronte’s schedules show that in the eight weeks before the crash, he worked 46 days with starting times at all hours, leaving little room for establishing a rest pattern.

At one point, he worked 29 days straight, from March 17 to April 14. After three days off, he worked six days straight before the crash.

He often had eight to 10 hours off between shifts. Some of that time off was used for commuting and preparing for work instead of sleeping.

In his deposition, Tacoronte said “everyone knows you don’t get much sleep” working for a railroad. Engineers and conductors, he said, are constantly “in a zone” of trying to stay awake and do their jobs as safely as possible.

Tacoronte also recalled that the night before the crash, his wife had confronted him.

“ ‘You sound tired. You’ve got to be tired,’ ” he quoted her as saying. “And I am always telling her I’m OK.”

In contrast, Wells, in his deposition, said he had had at least 12 hours of sleep before reporting to work April 23.

His schedules for March and April 2002 show that he put in many 10- or 11-hour shifts, mostly during the night and early morning. He worked for 11 days straight at one point, but had more days off than Tacoronte, including a six-day break.

Wells worked more than 11 hours during each of his last two shifts before the accident. After almost a day off, he said, he was “well rested” and “very alert” before departing April 23.

But in his deposition, Wells acknowledged that he told accident investigators earlier that he was “kinda tired” when his train left Los Angeles.

He also complained to them about the quality of sleep train crews receive and that he would like to see more set work schedules “instead of working 7 days a week, 365 days a year, and having to beg for time off.”