Sound Transit Declares Emergency Due To Light Rail Issues
Written by Jennifer McLawhorn, Managing Editor
Photo courtesy of Sound Transit
SEATTLE - Sound Transit CEO Goran Sparrman declared "the existence of an emergency" to seek a no-bid work order for HNTB to provide technical services.
According to the report, the no-bid work order is for technical services up to $1.5 million. In the future, larger contracts will be sent to bid as Sound Transit predicts it will need to complete projects through early 2026. Through November, train operations were affected for a total of 376 hours.
CEO Sparrman said that a report on power supply failures is expected by early March. However, Sound Transit is currently starting work on short-term fixes. This includes cleaning rails and “inspecting slack train-power wires downtown.”
Some of the issues that caused delays include a damaged train wire next to University of Washington Station, overhead wires in the downtown tunnel in need of inspection and tightening, grime on rails inside the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel that impeded the flow of electricity, flaws at the dispatch center, shifting ballast, fragile software, and North Seattle tunnel power and railcar outages.
System slowdowns caused by stalled cars “accounted for 77 of 166 slowdowns in 11 months last year and were solved in 34 minutes on average, for instance by sending an extra train into the corridor while towing away the idle train.” The FTA does not collect service reliability data, but the emergency-declaration report from CEO Sparrman “mentioned ‘regulatory expections’ to keep trains on time.”
“We tell the FTA what the headways are going to be, and we have to keep to that,” said Sound Transit spokesperson John Gallagher.
