Item 26 - Adoption of the City of Santa Ana Emergency Operations Plan

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City of Santa Ana Emergency Operations Plan Part I Basic Plan Placentia Crash On Tuesday, April 23, 2002, about 8:10 AM, an eastbound Burlington Northern/Santa Fe Railway freight train collided head on with a standing westbound Southern California Regional Rail Authority passenger train at Control Point Atwood in the City of Placentia. Emergency response agencies reported that 162 persons were transported to local hospitals. There were two fatalities. Damage was estimated at $4.6 million. Glendale Derailment On January 26, 2005, a souhbound Metrolink commuter train collided with a sport utility vehicle (SUV) that had been abandoned on the tracks near the Glendale -Los Angeles city boundary. The train jackknifed and struck trains on both sides of it, one a stationary freight train and the other a northbound Metrolink train traveling in the opposite direction. These collisions resulted in 11 deaths and almost 200 injuries. Subsequent criticism focused on the issue of train configuration. Many commuter trains use a "pusher configuration" to avoid turnaround maneuvers and facilities required to reverse a train's direction. This means the trains are pushed from the back by the locomotive. There were assertions that this type of configuration made the accident worse and claims that if the engine had been in the front, the train might not have jackknifed and caused the second Metrolink train to derail. To increase rider safety, Metrolink temporarily roped off the first cars in all of their trains and allowed passenger seating in the second car and beyond. Metrolink gradually modified this policy. As of 2007, the line permitted passengers to sit in a portion of the first car when in "push mode," but did not allow seating in the forward -most section of the first car. Chatsworth Derailment The September 12, 2008 Chatsworth train accident resulted in 25 deaths and injuring more than half the train's passengers and also spawned significant changes to national rail safety standards. The head-on collision occurred in Chatsworth, a neighborhood of Los Angeles located at the western edge of the San Fernando Valley, involving a Metrolink commuter train and a Union Pacific freight train. All three locomotives, the leading Metrolink passenger car, and seven freight cars derailed. According to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the Metrolink train engineer most likely caused the collision because he was distracted by sending text messages while on duty. He failed to obey a red stop signal that indicated it was not safe to proceed from the double -track into the single-track section and, thus, collided head-on with the freight train that was traveling on the same single- track section from the opposite direction. 101