PrintNovember 20, 2010
The Faking of Pelham One-Two-Three
The New York Post brings us the story of a new blockbuster set in the city’s subway system. Get a good grip on your strap and be prepared for a sudden stop because there is a dangerous conspiracy at work in the Transit Authority.
NYC Transit supervisors falsified thousands of vital signal inspections across the subway system for years, leaving straphangers at risk for deadly collisions like the one that killed nine people in Washington D.C., The Post learned.
Across every line, a cabal of managers in the signal department forced maintainers to fib on the inspections by threatening them with punishments like the loss of overtime, according to a sweeping six-month investigation by the inspector general of the MTA, which oversees NYC Transit.
At least one high-level chief, Tracy Bowdwin - the MTS’s highest-earning Signal Department supervisor at $165,000 a year - was demoted last week in the fallout, and managers are still being questioned, transit sources said.
The Transit Authority employees over one thousand signal maintenance personnel who are paid between $60,000 and $127,000 per year and approximately one hundred managers who are supposed to oversee the inspection and maintenance of the signals. The signal maintainers are represented by the Transport Workers Union Local 100.
Signal maintainers would routinely enter false inspections into their logbooks, which managers used to write reports. In some cases, managers would write a bogus report even if a worker refused to enter the fudged data in his book.
Workers who didn’t comply lost overtime privileges or got sent to the dirtiest, most leak infested tunnels, sources said.
The self-proclaimed “greatest city in the world,” that great liberal nanny-state paradise whose concern for the people has lead to the most onerous regulations on smoking and restaurant fare has a ticking public safety time bomb beneath its crowed streets. Apparently being overtaxed and over-regulated doesn’t make the public one iota safer, but it does create jobs…public sector union jobs that is.
Falsification of records is a felony offense, though it was unclear whether the managers and the workers will face criminal charges.
Why complicate public safety with accountability.
