Angels Flight Probe Focuses on Cable Spool

Investigators said Friday that problems with a mechanized cable spool are the likely cause of Thursday’s fatal Angels Flight accident, in which a railway car hurtled down a steep track and collided with its twin when its controlling cable slackened while unwinding from the spool.

They said it will probably take many months to pinpoint the precise defect or malfunction that caused the cable to come loose. However, they said they suspect that the culprit is a gear or motor that powers the spool.

“It’s going to be a long investigation,” said Dave Watson, an investigator from the National Transportation Safety Board. “For us, six months is a quickie.”

Watson said that one problem is the unusual nature of the tiny funicular, which has ferried 4 million passengers up and down the steep hill between Hill Street and the top of Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles since the cars were restored and new mechanical equipment was installed in 1996.

Watson, who is assigned to the NTSB’s railroad section, said he had never investigated an accident involving a funicular. He said he had to look the word up in the dictionary to learn what it was.

Until investigators come up with the cause and correction, the historic railway will remain closed.

Authorities said they have already ruled out human error or a broken cable in the lunchtime accident, which killed one person and injured seven others.

At the time of the crash, the man at the controls of what has been billed as the world’s smallest railway--whose cars are designed to counterbalance each other’s weight as they pass one another midway through a trip--was its most experienced operator.

He told NTSB investigators that he saw the ascending car slip about five feet when it was about two-thirds of the way up Angels Flight’s steep incline. Investigators said the operator told them he reacted by hitting a button controlling emergency friction brakes--one for each of two spools that parcel out cable to the cars.

The cars do not have brakes.

As the tragedy unfolded, the emergency brake failed to hold the slipping car, and it barreled down the slope. The brake for the descending car, however, did hold that car in place as the other car crashed into it.

NTSB investigator Watson said that prevented an even worse accident. If the cars had kept going, they would have left their track and shot into Hill Street.

After the accident, investigators inspected the spool that feeds cable to the topmost car and found that 40 to 50 feet of slackened cable--a 7/8-inch rope of braided steel--had unwound.

“We discovered that the cable had come off the side of the spool on the north side, and that resulted in uncontrolled movement of the car associated with that cable and the ultimate collision,” Watson said. “. . . We will try to determine why the cable came off.”

“We’re going to tear the system down and look for internal failure,” he said.

Meanwhile, several people who were either involved in the city Community Redevelopment Agency-sponsored restoration of Angels Flight, or who said they had wanted to become involved, raised questions about whether wise safety choices were made during design and construction.

The original restoration design for the railway, which was closed for 27 years, called for a waist-level gate at the rear of each car. But the gates were eliminated after CRA officials and engineers decided that they were not necessary and could actually make the cars more dangerous.

One man who was seriously injured in Thursday’s accident--the restored railway’s first--was propelled out of a back door onto the tracks.

Present and former CRA officials said Friday that the agency determined, after much debate, not to include gates because they might block emergency egress and might not be sturdy or tall enough to hold passengers tossed into them.

But one construction official on the project, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Friday: “You can’t fall out the back if there is a gate.”

After construction was completed, the CRA leased the railway to the nonprofit Angels Flight Railway Foundation, which contracted out its operation to the Angels Flight Operating Company LLC. A key person pushing for the restoration, historic preservationist John H. Welborne, serves as president of the foundation and manager of the operating company.

Welborne denied Friday that any safety shortcuts were taken, insisting, “There have been and will be no compromises on safety.’

Representatives of the elevator company that once operated Angels Flight said they were concerned about the cable cars’ safety when the transportation system was reopened five years ago.

When the cable cars were going to be reinstalled, Oliver and Williams’ representatives said, they were asked to submit a maintenance contract bid and they did. But in discussions with the railway foundation, they decided to withdraw their bid, according to both Thomas J. Hawkins, an elevator code specialist for the firm, and the firm’s attorney.

“We gave them all the figures, but we said, ‘We don’t want to work on it because there are too many things that are not safe,’ ” Hawkins recalled, citing, for example, a lack of brakes on the cars.

“I said it would probably cost $25,000 to $30,000 to make it safer,” he added.

Hawkins said his conversations were with Welborne, but Welborne said he recalled no such conversations. Welborne did say Friday that emergency brakes on the cars were considered at one point but were dismissed as being inferior to ones on the cable spools.

When Angels Flight was reopened and dedicated, Hawkins said, “I told my wife not to ride on it.”

A limited set of Public Utilities Commission safety inspection records released Friday showed that Angels Flight’s operators failed to document some required monthly, semiannual and annual inspections of the mechanism that is suspected of failing.

But the operators told the PUC, whose railway division is charged with safety oversight for trains, subways and this funicular--the only one of its kind in California--that they had performed the inspections. In the documents, Angels Flight chief engineer John Behnke is quoted as saying that operators merely failed to record them. He could not be reached for comment Friday.

In an annual inspection last July, PUC engineers noted that operators also had a private contractor check out the integrity of the cables--which operate in a fashion similar to those on a ski lift--last March and found no breaks, fraying or stretching problems.

The reports noted only two mechanical problems with the reopened railway before Thursday’s crash. A switch broke once, and another time a gearbox overheated. In both cases, the cars stopped en route, but the operator was able to restart them and passengers disembarked uneventfully.

PUC engineer Joey E. Bigornia, assigned to monitor Angels Flight since it reopened, wrote in one report that he witnessed a maintenance mechanic conduct a daily pre-opening inspection of the railway last July “in complete accordance with the [foundation’s] operating procedure.”

Welborne declined to release those procedures to The Times on Friday, citing liability concerns. He said that he expects an insurance policy to help pay repair costs and that he plans to solicit private donations to reopen the railway he refers to as Los Angeles’ “beloved icon.”

The PUC did not release the bulk of its inspection records. In those made public Friday, the agency appeared mainly to be checking to be certain that required safety checks were performed by the operators of Angels Flight and its contractors.

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Times staff writers Beth Shuster and Patrick McGreevy contributed to this story.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Accident Investigation

As the investigation of the Angels Flight accident continues, investigators are focusing on the mechanized spool that parcels out the cable to the cars. Here are the events leading up to the accident, according to investigators:

1. Operator in station notices the ascending car slip while two-thirds of the way up the incline, and hits a button that remotely controls the emergency friction brakes on the spools in the machine room, which is under the station.

2. One brake is attached to each of the two spools. The brake on the spool controlling the cable for the descending car works. The brake on the spool controlling cable for the upper car does not work, and the car plunges down the track.

3. The upper car hits the lower car.

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Note: not to scale.

Source: Community Redevelopment Agency

Researched by PATRICK McGREEVY / Los Angeles Times