Funicular Car Design Had Called for Brakes
Despite their private engineers’ warnings that track brakes were necessary on the Angels Flight cable cars, city redevelopment officials allowed the builders to alter the design in 1995 to eliminate those brakes and other safety features from the funicular system, city records show.
Construction documents show that officials of the Community Redevelopment Agency, who were responsible for the project, allowed changes in the design that deviated in significant ways from the specifications set by the agency’s private engineering consultants, Parsons Brinckerhoff Quade & Douglas Inc.
“The submitted documents show evidence that the proposed design is not in compliance with the required scope of work as related to the safety of the system,” the consultants wrote in a letter to the CRA’s private project management contractor on Jan. 22, 1996, a month before the funicular reopened on Feb. 24.
Some experts say that if Angels Flight had a track braking system, it could have reduced the chances of injuries in an accident such as the one a month ago today in which one person was killed and seven injured.
“Some sort of track braking system could have decelerated the car and minimized the force of the impact,” said USC civil engineering professor Najmedin Meshkati, who studied many of the documents for The Times. “If the track brake was coupled with some other mechanism such as a tail hook, it might have been able to stop it.”
An executive for the now-defunct firm that designed the funicular’s motor drive system defended the lack of an emergency track brake. “It was a safe system,” said Michael Stephenson of Yantrak, which was based in Carson City, Nev. He declined to elaborate.
Christopher Bisgaard, a private attorney hired by the CRA to investigate the accident, said the agency is withholding detailed comment until it completes its own investigation.
“The CRA believes it acted reasonably,” Bisgaard said regarding the construction project.
Ongoing Probe of Fatal Accident
On Feb. 1, an 83-year-old Holocaust survivor from New Jersey was killed, and his wife and six others were injured when one of the funicular’s two cable cars hurtled down the steep track and collided with its twin. Federal investigators found that cable had unraveled from one of the system’s two drums, and they are seeking to determine why.
Documents obtained by The Times under the state Public Records Act show that less than two weeks before the historic Angels Flight reopened on Feb. 24, 1996, construction managers sought reassurance from the builders that their safety features were adequate, and got responses that struck them as imprecise.
On Feb. 14, 1996, James Guerrero of the project management firm Harris and Associates wrote in a letter to the main contractor for Angels Flight, Pueblo Contracting Services: “The proposed system had a safety brake that was to have worked in the event of an overspeed condition or cable rupture.”
Such exchanges should have been wrapped up much earlier, said USC’s Meshkati, an expert on safety systems.
“They should have had those long before they started building,” he said.
CRA officials eventually signed off on the project as complete and meeting the requirements of the contract.
Interviews and construction documents show that neither Yantrak nor its predecessor company on the project, Lift Engineering, had ever built a funicular of this type before. Both firms were headed by engineer Yan Kunczynski. Lift Engineering had built ski lifts in which five people were killed and scores more injured.
Yantrak, which went out of business after Angels Flight was completed, designed the motor drive system containing the spline that investigators suspect may have failed. Kunczynski could not be reached for comment.
Parsons Brinckerhoff was hired by the CRA in 1994 to develop project specifications for the cable railway. The specifications called for a funicular system in which one cable was attached to the restored orange and black cars, Sinai and Olivet. It counterbalanced with a mechanical system and motor so that when one car climbed the hill, the other would descend. A modern motor drive system was to include an automatic braking feature in the motor room.
As a key additional safety feature, the original specifications called for each car to be fitted with emergency track brakes that would automatically stop the cars if they exceeded safe speeds because of a loose or broken cable.
As envisioned by Parsons, the emergency track braking system would be mounted on the cars to grip the outboard running rail using hydraulics triggered by a self-contained sensor on the car if the vehicle exceeded safe speed.
When the funicular was rebuilt, brakes were installed in the motor drive system. Yet the two cable cars had no brakes of any kind.
In its Jan. 22, 1996, letter to Harris, Parsons Brinckerhoff recommended that the CRA reject the builder’s design standards, but CRA officials later signed off on the project.
A Parsons Brinckerhoff spokeswoman said last week that provisions of the firm’s contract with the CRA precluded further comment.
Guerrero of Harris and Associates also posed questions in a letter to Pueblo Contracting at the time about whether the system was built as safely as the one originally proposed by Parsons Brinckerhoff.
“They had not met the requirement of the contract to provide an alternate braking system by the time I left the job,” Guerrero recalled this week.
While saying he relied on CRA engineers to deliver him a safe system, historic preservationist John H. Welborne, the president of the nonprofit Angels Flight Railway Foundation, which leases the system from the CRA, distanced himself from the agency’s decision to use an untried design.
Welborne said that Angels Flight, which is closed indefinitely as the National Transportation Safety Board investigates the crash, will be rebuilt with a different design than that provided by Yantrak.
“We are going to find an experienced manufacturer of funiculars, and we will use tried technology that is in use and in service in other locations,” Welborne said.
Cable Cars Part of Downtown Renewal
Angels Flight originally operated between 1901 and 1969, when the track was dismantled as the CRA brought office towers to Bunker Hill.
Seen later as a way to generate new interest in downtown by restoring one of its historic features, the reconstruction project moved the 298-foot rail system about a block south to 4th and Hill streets.
Three firms bid on the project--Pueblo Contracting Services Inc., American Constructors California Inc. and Kiewit Pacific Co. The contract was awarded to San Fernando-based Pueblo even though its $4-million bid was the second lowest. The lowest bidder, American, was judged non-responsive because it lacked experience with historical preservation.
All three bidders proposed to use the specified design, including track brakes on the two cable cars, documents show.
To meet the requirement of experience in funicular construction, Pueblo’s bid included a subcontract with Westmont Industries of Santa Fe Springs, which had maintained cable cars at the Sheraton Industry Hills Resort and in San Francisco. Westmont, in turn, indicated it would subcontract with Lift Engineering Inc. of Carson City, Nev., for the drive system.
Lift Engineering was headed by Kunczynski, whose firm had built ski lifts throughout the United States.
American Constructors protested the contract award, saying Westmont’s maintenance work did not constitute sufficient experience and adding that Lift Engineering “designs and builds ski lifts, they have never designed or built a funicular.”
The agency dismissed the protest after a background check concluded that Lift Engineering had built 800 cable drive installations throughout the world.
However, during the year between bids and the contract award, Westmont was forced to drop out because of other commitments, according to Westmont’s general manager Ray Meier. That elevated Kunczynski’s firm to the main subcontractor role.
Subcontractor’s Accident Record
During the Angels Flight project in December 1995, a clamp device failed on a Lift Engineering ski lift on Whistler Mountain in Canada. Two people died. Harris and Associates construction manager Guerrero remembers hearing about the accident and asking Lift Engineering for information. The firm replied that the type of clamp device that failed was not going to be used on Angels Flight.
In July 1996, Lift Engineering filed for bankruptcy, but Kunczynski had formed a new company called Yantrak, which had taken over the Angels Flight work.
Early in the design process, Kunczynski’s firm proposed a different system from the one in the CRA’s bid specifications.
Instead of one cable, Kunczynski proposed two, one for each cable car, synchronized by a drive system with connecting gears.
The new proposal was unveiled about eight months before Angels Flight reopened, by Pueblo project manager Donald Kahn Jr. at a construction management meeting, according to minutes of the June 7, 1995, session. Kahn said the new system was better, but Guerrero, Welborne and CRA engineer John Benzing said they needed assurances, and Benzing asked that comparable diagrams be provided for a single-cable system.
At a meeting four months later, Kahn said the clamping brake system specified by Parsons Brinckerhoff would not work because the cars shared a common third rail for much of the track.
Welborne and others questioned whether a braking system was necessary, but Pueblo left it up to the CRA to figure out, the minutes show.
“After additional discussion regarding brake systems, brake drums, cable strength, safety cable connections to cars and points of failure, JB [John Benzing] directed Harris and Associates to direct Pueblo Contracting to produce a design without the track brake,” the minutes said.
Benzing, who has since retired from the CRA and moved to Nevada, could not be reached for comment.
In November 1995, Guerrero said during the monthly construction management meeting that Parsons Brinckerhoff engineers “still felt that a track brake is reasonable and necessary. [The firm’s] concern is that there is no precedent for a rail car without a safety brake or a safety cable.”
The issue came up again at the next monthly meeting, where Guerrero said, “Yan needs to provide documentation that indicates his system is safe, if not safer, [or equivalent] than the system with a track brake,” the minutes said.
Kunczynski wrote on Feb. 13, 1996, to Pueblo that “careful analysis of the concept design solution proposed by the RFP [Parsons’ bid papers] proved to be technically incorrect or inefficient” and that the caliper brake system “cannot be employed on the split rail of the train bypass.”
Instead, he said a different drive system with two drums was being used. Each drum had a brake.
“The design,” Kunczynski wrote, “offers almost double the rope safety factor compared to [Parsons’] RFP.”
Guerrero wrote to Pueblo a day later--less than two weeks before Angels Flight reopened--raising questions and asking for a written analysis of the chances that a gear or shaft might fail and allow the car to “freely translate,” or, in layman’s terms, go out of control.
He also asked for a justification of the decision not to install gates on the cars, which cut costs by $9,900.
On Feb. 16, Pueblo’s Kahn wrote back to Guerrero, noting that the “system has been accepted and released for construction by [the CRA].”
“The system safety brake was not realistic in concept or execution,” he added.
Kahn said the ability of the cable cars to slip down the tracks is “highly unlikely,” but added “it should be noted that the factor of safety is most effective and ultimately guaranteed only through proper maintenance and inspection.”
The CRA’s Benzing signed a certificate of release on Dec. 30, 1996, indicating that Pueblo had “performed in accordance with the terms thereof.”
Welborne said Angels Flight’s operating company regularly inspected the block-long funicular. The state Public Utilities Commission, the agency charged with safety oversight of Angels Flight, did not conduct a formal inspection between 1996 and 2000. In its inspection last year, the PUC raised questions about the thoroughness of the railway’s inspection record-keeping system.
Bisgaard, the attorney hired by the CRA to investigate the accident, said the agency does not yet know why the accident occurred and is cooperating with federal investigators. The CRA is deferring all comments on the accident to Bisgaard.
Jeffrey Bahar, an attorney for Pueblo, declined to comment except to say the firm is also assisting with the federal investigation.
