Metro Rail Safety Worker Sues Over Her Dismissal

A safety engineer on Wednesday filed a lawsuit saying she was fired one hour after ordering work halted at a Metro Rail subway station because of ventilation problems.

Within days, the same sort of ventilation woes prompted state officials to shut down all system construction for nearly a week. However, Gloria Fuqua did not link the systemwide stoppage to her earlier order.

Fuqua, in a news conference Wednesday, said her supervisors “specifically instructed” her to ignore safety violations when she started working last May as a safety engineer for the Tutor-Saliba construction company at the subterranean Metro Rail station at 7th and Flower streets.

Nevertheless, she said, she “continued to write up safety violations” after “receiving many complaints from workers regarding unhealthful safety conditions.”

On July 19, she found an employee doing galvanized welding with inadequate ventilation, Fuqua said.

“Galvanized welding emits toxic fumes, thereby creating a dangerous and unhealthy air quality,” said Fuqua’s attorney, Gloria Allred.

“In order to protect their health and safety . . . Ms. Fuqua immediately stopped all galvanized welding in the station,” Allred said.

Fuqua said her firing left her “feeling helpless.”

“I couldn’t help the people down there who were breathing those fumes,” she said.

Fuqua said that the true reason she was fired “was because I was implementing safety.”

Fuqua’s lawsuit alleges that she was wrongfully terminated in violation of the state Labor and Government codes. It asks Tutor-Saliba to reinstate her and pay her lost earnings and damages.

Representatives of Tutor-Saliba did not respond to a phone call seeking comment. A spokeswoman for the Rail Construction Corp., the subway-building subsidiary of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, could not be reached Wednesday evening.

Fuqua has gotten another job on the Metro Rail project, working as a safety engineer for another contractor.

Less than a week after Fuqua was fired by Tutor-Saliba, Cal/OSHA inspectors determined that poor ventilation was failing to clear the incomplete tunnel system of noxious diesel fumes. They ordered construction halted on the entire 4.4-mile subway.

Full-scale construction was not resumed until six days later, after the installation of improved ventilation equipment.

Fuqua would not say whether her complaints had triggered the inspection that led to the systemwide shutdown.

That shutdown was the latest in a series of major problems that have plagued the Metro Rail subway, a $3.9-billion project that is millions of dollars over budget and months behind schedule.

In July, 1990, a devastating fire gutted a 750-foot segment of the tunnel under U.S. 101 near Union Station, contributing to the delays and cost overruns.