Blaze Is the First Serious Accident on Metro Rail Job

. . . If all goes well--which, as experts have noted, it seldom does in tunneling . . . .

--From a 1987 Times story on the beginning of Metro Rail construction.

The fiery collapse of a section of the Metro Rail tunnel near Union Station Friday was the first major damage on the massive, 4.4-mile subway project.

No one has died and, according to a variety of observers, there have been relatively few serious injuries in the subway construction. By contrast, six workers have died in the 18-month history of the undersea English Channel tunnel.

“I think it’s been a very safe job,” Robert Stranberg, head of Cal/OSHA, said Friday.

“They’re pretty well safety-minded down there,” said Ron Myers, a veteran tunnel worker and international representative of the Laborer’s International Union. “As far as I’m concerned the city (the Southern California Rapid Transit District) has done an outstanding safety job and so has Cal/OSHA.”

California prides itself on having some of the strictest tunnel construction policies in the country. They came about in the wake of a tunnel fire in Sylmar in 1971, in which 17 workers died when a pocket of natural gas exploded.

Critical testimony indicated that the safety foreman on that job did not have the authority to countermand his bosses’ orders even if he considered them dangerous.

Subsequent amendments to the state Labor Code said engineers who inspect underground tunnels must be certified by Cal/OSHA as “underground safety representatives” with the authority to correct safety hazards, including the ability to stop work.

“Those resulting changes in the law . . . set the scene for incredibly safe operating practices,” said Britton McFetridge, chief consultant to the Assembly Government Operations Committee.

However, Cal/OSHA, which is supposed to make sure that construction companies carry out the safety inspections, has been hobbled in recent years.

Gov. George Deukmejian eliminated the agency’s funding in 1987, forcing the federal Occupational Safety and Health Agency to take over safety inspections. Voters in 1988 approved an initiative to restore Cal/OSHA funding, even though Stranberg himself co-authored the ballot argument against approving the money.

Since funding was restored, Cal/OSHA has been slow to staff its tunnel inspection program. Testimony at a legislative hearing in January indicated that there was only one Cal/OSHA tunnel inspector assigned to Los Angeles, as opposed to six in 1987.

Stranberg said Friday that the number of tunnel inspectors has now been restored to six. However, a representative of the Laborers Local 300, which has 200 members working on the Metro Rail section that caught fire, said, “There aren’t enough inspectors.”

While anyone can call himself a safety consultant, firms that do underground tunneling in California must designate a qualified employee as the job’s safety representative. The employee must pass a written and oral test to gain Cal/OSHA certification, and is considered responsible for developing a safety policy and inspecting the job.

By contrast, many companies that work above ground pay scant attention to safety, industrial safety experts say. One expert recalls a company where “safety officer” was a part-time title given to the head bookkeeper.

The importance of safety in tunnel construction was demonstrated just last month when a federal grand jury in Wisconsin indicted two executives of an Illinois construction firm for failing to take safety precautions that could have prevented a 1988 methane explosion that killed three men in a Milwaukee sewer tunnel project.

A methane explosion also changed the course of Metro Rail, but it came before any excavation took place.

In March, 1985, a methane gas explosion blew apart a clothing store in the Fairfax District, one of the areas being considered for the subway route.

Subsequently, an independent panel of experts reviewed Metro Rail’s safety and concluded that the project was more complicated and posed more hazards than other subway, highway and pipeline projects in the United States.

The Southern California Rapid Transit District later routed Metro Rail away from the Fairfax District to avoid the methane gas and oil deposits common there.