DC Metro timeline confirms long wait times for rescue from smoke-filled cars

Twenty-seven minutes after the first report of smoke on Washington DC’s Metro on Monday, a 911 dispatcher received a sixth call made by passengers on a stalled train. The sixth passenger to call asked “if help is on the way because the train is filling with smoke”, the city administrator said on Thursday.

The timeline of Monday’s subway incident, which left a 61-year-old woman dead, was released by city administrator Rashad Young. Federal investigators said an electrical malfunction generated smoke that flooded crowded, stalled subway cars and sent more than 80 people to hospital.

Passengers were outraged by the response from the Metro and the city, which the federal National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is investigating, along with the cause of the malfunction.

The preliminary timeline released by Young confirms that it took at least a half-hour for emergency teams to reach some passengers trapped on the train.

At 3.18pm, someone above ground called 911 to report smoke rising from the tunnel. Within four minutes, a Metro official called to warn of heavy smoke at L’Enfant Plaza station, and two minutes later another called to request firefighters and medics.

By 3.33pm, callers had asked for ambulances to the station, and someone trapped on the train had told the 911 operator the tunnel was full of smoke. Passengers continued to call for the next 12 minutes, and at 3.45pm a man and woman made separate calls to ask “if help is on the way because the train is filling with smoke”.

The timeline does not record what time paramedics first reached stranded passengers, but does show that an emergency team reached L’Enfant seven minutes after the first request.

The long delay before teams reached stranded cars may in part be attributable to confusion or miscommunication between Metro officials and emergency teams who did not know whether power still ran through the high-voltage third rail of the subway tracks. At 3.42pm a 911 caller stuck on the train was told by an official not to evacuate the train “because the trains were still live”, but at 3.44pm another Metro official confirmed to authorities that power was shut down.

Firefighters had been at L’Enfant for 13 minutes by then, and many passengers decided to evacuate the train cars and head for the surface on their own. At 4.25pm, an hour after smoke was first reported, medics transported the woman who later died to hospital, after at least 20 minutes of CPR on the scene.

Confusion may have also stemmed from an initial report of a debris fire at a separate location, which may not be related to the electrical malfunction. NTSB spokesman Peter Knudson told the Guardian it could take a year for the agency to complete its investigation of the incident and the “survival factors” of the city’s response.

Independently of the investigation, Metro general manager Richard Sarles will step down on Friday. Sarles took over the transit authority after a 2009 train collision killed nine people, the worst accident in the Metro’s history.