Communications among biggest failures of LRT ice storm woes this week

Liz Haig says she probably should have stayed home.

But when she left for work at 8:30 Wednesday morning, the streets and sidewalks clear, she decided to take the Confederation Line to her office in the east end and thought, "OK, this will be fine."

Haig was wrong.

Her eastbound train stopped a few times for two to three minutes — "That's not unusual," she said — and then, around 9:10 a.m., it suddenly ground to a halt between Lees and Hurdman stations on the bridge over the Rideau River.

After about 10 minutes, the operator came out of his cab and told nearby customers that he was going to try to back up the train into Lees station.

And then they never heard from him again. 

After about 20 minutes, one of the 100 or so passengers pressed the emergency button, and whoever responded said they would try to find out what was going on. But again, riders heard nothing back.  

"People were starting to look anxious and tired and ... the heat was off, so it was pretty cold," said Haig. "I could hear the rain pouring down on the windows and the freezing rain, it was making lots of noise and the wind was blowing. So [at] a few points, the train started sort of rocking a little bit, and we were over the river."

At about 10:15 a.m., more than an hour after the train lost power on the bridge, firefighters arrived to cut a hole in the fence along the side of the train and helped passengers onto a path that led into the station.

"I've been an OC Transpo rider for over a decade … so I'm really used to transit delays," said Haig. But almost more frustrating than the train failure, she said, was the "complete and total lack of communication."

To state the obvious, there were many problems with Wednesday's commute. But as Haig's experience shows, the lack of communications was perhaps the biggest failure, because it could have — and should have — been avoided.

That's not to say the train's technical failure was acceptable. Ottawa deserves a transit system that is reliable for more than a month or two at a time, and that isn't shut down for long stretches after a winter storm.

But at least there was an explanation for this problem. When ice forms around the overhead wire, it prevents proper contact with other parts of the system that deliver power to the train. That causes voltage fluctuations, which the computer system reads as abnormal and powers down the train.

This time, OC Transpo and its contractor Rideau Transit Maintenance (RTM) took preventative measures by running two trains overnight to keep the overhead wire clear of ice. They launched 13 trains for early morning service — 10 of which were equipped with newly acquired winter carbon strips that help remove ice build-up — with a plan to run all 13, all day.

But shortly after 9 a.m., five trains lost power, the most to ever be stranded on the line at one time.

The eight other trains were moved to nearby stations for protection from the elements. This was one lesson learned from last January, when transit workers sent a working train to retrieve a struck train, and the rescue train ended up damaging a swath of the system. 

That a train that failed near Lees station wasn't a big surprise as that's been a problem spot for the LRT due to a humid microclimate over the Rideau River. But the fact that four other trains lost power is leading transit officials to investigate whether recent work on light-rail vehicles to try to improve their reliability somehow made train safety systems too sensitive to voltage fluctuations.

As OC Transpo executives pointed out in February — when explaining why the Confederation Line was shut down after the last ice storm — the LRT hadn't had issues with freezing rain since it opened in September 2019 until very recently.

Communications among worst failures

These details may not be particularly comforting, especially as they are the latest in a long string of problems with the $2.1-billion LRT system. But at least they provide a possible reason why Wednesday's power failure occurred.

So what is the reason for the abysmal communications that so many customers received?

Operators are trained to frequently update their passengers on what's happening during any sort of event. And there have been anecdotal reports that some train operators did just that. But not on Haig's train stuck over the icy river. 

In that vacuum of information, Haig said she could hear other passengers discussing whether they should try to break a window.

LRT passengers describe being helped off a stopped train by firefighters

2 years ago

Duration 0:35

Passengers were escorted off a stopped train near Lees station Wednesday morning. Multiple people told CBC they were stuck for more than 45 minutes.

"I would have been really happy to get some updates or even just an acknowledgement from OC Transpo that they knew a train was stuck and that they were working on sending someone to come get us or that there was some kind of emergency plan," she pointed out.

The communications failure wasn't just limited to the passengers on Haig's train. OC Transpo as a whole did a poor job of letting the public know what was happening.

The transit agency's Twitter account announced at 9:46 a.m. that R1 bus service was in place and that there was no train service on line 1. The tweet ended with the promise, "Updates to follow."

The next few tweets repeated that message about R1 service, and there was no new information until 1:50 p.m. — a full four hours later. In that time, the account did not respond to many queries, including Haig's about her stranded train.

It's difficult to understand why passengers could not be told, via Twitter, to hang on, that help was on the way.

And the news conference, broadcast on the city's YouTube channel, wasn't much better. Statements from officials provided few new details, and no specifics of exactly what happened and when. There was confusion over the 13 trains being out on the line — the explanation that they were sent to stations was provided after the fact — and officials sounded surprised to hear passengers were stranded over the river for an hour.

It is exceptionally frustrating for all involved that three-and-a-half years since the Confederation Line's launch, we are experiencing yet new problems with the LRT.

But considering all the practice officials have had delivering bad news, one would think they'd be better at handling it by now.