Half of Tunnel Safety Officers to Be Replaced : Metro Rail: The 8 representatives are too inexperienced to protect workers, transit officials say.

Half of the safety officers on the Metro Rail subway construction project will be replaced because they are too inexperienced to protect worker safety, a top county transit official said Friday.

Officials also criticized the consortium that is paid to manage construction of the $3-billion tunnel and subway station project, saying they failed to ensure that safety representatives for the first 4.4-mile stretch of subway had adequate qualifications.

“We expect high-quality people,” said Tom Tanke, executive vice president for technical operations of the Rail Construction Corp., a subsidiary of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission. “We want to make this thing (subway construction) safe and (replacing safety representatives) is the only way it’s going to get done.”

Tanke had ordered a review of the project’s 16 safety officers after The Times reported in September that the subway construction safety record was running nearly 28% higher than the national norm for construction projects and 38.75% over the average for comparable projects.

He said the eight safety representatives expected to be replaced within the next month may remain on the project as subordinates to their replacements.

Metro Rail sources said the current safety representatives were warned of impending changes this week by Chuck Kelso, director of safety for the consortium of Ralph M. Parsons Corp., Deleuw, Cather & Co. and Dillingham Corp. (PDCD), which was hired to manage the subway construction.

Tanke was critical of PDCD for allowing safety officers to be hired who lacked adequate experience. “We came down pretty hard on PDCD on their review of these people and the qualifications of these people,” he said.

Under existing contract regulations, PDCD could have insisted that contractors hire better qualified safety officers, but did not. Some of the safety representatives had less than two years’ experience when named to their jobs or received their training solely on the Metro Rail project.

New qualifications for safety representatives--both on work currently under way and on the next phase of the project scheduled to begin in early 1991--require a minimum of five years of “significant” safety experience in heavy construction, said Tanke.

Safety representatives working in the tunnels also will have to be certified by Cal/OSHA, the state agency that enforces industrial safety laws and investigates accidents. Current tunnel safety officers also must have Cal/OSHA certification. To become certified, tunnel safety representatives are required to pass a written and oral test. Cal/OSHA asks for, but does not require, at least two years’ experience in tunnel safety.

“We’re going to screen those folks very carefully,” he said. “We’re not talking about people fresh out of school and that sort of stuff.”

Tanke acknowledged that there has been resistance to the changes from some contractors, “but they’re going to do it. We are going to definitely improve our safety record, we’re very serious about that. Our goal is we want to set the model for the country to be the safest, the best.”

To attract safety representatives who meet the new requirements, Tanke estimated that contractors would have to pay salaries of $55,000 to $65,000 a year, well above the current reported average of $30,000 to $40,000.

Even though the safety representatives are hired by the contractors, they are empowered to order dangerous work halted or unsafe conditions remedied.

Veteran safety officers have said it takes seasoned, knowledgeable safety officers to be familiar with the myriad of underground construction hazards, including the potential dangers of gases, such as methane. In addition, good safety officers must be able to hold their ground on occasion against their own bosses and order unsafe conditions corrected, even if it means a costly slow-down in construction.

In July, the Los Angeles Transportation Commission and the Rail Construction Corp. took over responsibility for building the 18-mile subway system from the Southern California Rapid Transit District.

The takeover occurred just two days before a devastating July 13 fire in an uncompleted section of subway tunnel caused $2.2 million in damage and closed the Hollywood Freeway through downtown for three days. The LACTC later reported the fire was an industrial accident caused by smoldering embers from a metal-cutting torch.