The Metro-North railroad collision in Westchester County,
New York, on February 4 that left six people dead has revealed the
psychological trauma transit workers can face.
In December 2013, after a Metro-North train jumped the rails
in the Bronx, killing four and injuring 75, a union leader described the train engineer as “totally traumatized.” The
New York accident made national headlines, but other than the union quote,
little attention was given to that trauma he faced.
A similar description of an engineer’s well-being came up at
a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) briefing last week, two days
after a Metro-North crash in Valhalla, New York, on February 4, which left six
people dead. “I think it goes without saying that he’s very traumatized,” a
board representative said.
While the conversation after deadly transit accidents tends
to focus on the passengers, transit workers often deal with unique forms of
trauma. John Tolman, vice president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers
and Trainmen, says railroad operators will likely face three potentially
traumatic incidents in their careers. And underground, many subway operators
deal with as many as three “12-9” situations in a career, code for when a
passenger is under the train.
“The hardest part,”
Tolman says, “is that you’re usually the last person to see that particular
individual alive.”
For transit workers, accidents can lead to significant
psychological difficulties and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The
National Center for Intermodal Transportation surveyed 363 commuter railroad
operating employees for a 2011 report and found that 43.6 percent of them had
been involved in at least one critical incident—accidents, near misses,
collisions, personal injuries or contact with people or equipment on the
tracks. Of those employees, 12.1 percent reported symptoms consistent with PTSD
after the incidents. Employees involved in those incidents also reported higher
levels of intrusive thoughts, trouble sleeping and working, and depression.
Researchers around the world have studied the effects of
accidents on operators and have produced findings similar to those in the 2011
report. One journal article from 1989 compared “the mental distress of the
train drivers” to that of Vietnam War veterans.
Over the past three decades, thousands of transit workers
have turned to a psychologist named Howard Rombom for help after traumatic
incidents. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York and workers’
unions often send Rombom up to four referrals per week, and it was Rombom who
met with individuals involved in the 2013 derailment.
“The patients, I thought, were underserved,” Rombom, 63,
says of transit workers, from his Long Island, New York, office that overlooks
Manhasset Bay. “Really a forgotten piece of the population.” His patients also
include 9/11 rescue workers—some of whom continue to see him, all these years
later—and passengers who have experienced transit incidents.
Rombom’s treatment of transit workers differs from his
approach toward other patients. “Their injuries tend to be somewhat unique,”
Rombom says of the workers. For train operators who unintentionally help people
die by suicide, for example, they must deal with a phenomenon “that pretty much
doesn’t happen anywhere else,” he says. His leading diagnosis for transit
workers is PTSD, and depression, anxiety and adjustment disorders are also
common.
“Most of them can’t go back to work. They develop avoidance
behaviors. They find it difficult to go back on the subways and the buses,” he
says. The workers reexperience the trauma in their minds, spend less time
around other people and have difficulty sleeping and concentrating. Some
transit workers also develop high blood pressure, heart palpitations and
excessive sweating, which Rombom says are “physical manifestations of their
anxiety.”
To help, Rombom and the other psychologists in his practice
work to “desensitize” patients from the incidents and “reintegrate the trauma
into their psychological framework,” he says, adding that treatment varies from
individual to individual. “We have no package, no recipe.”
Though Rombom has been working with such patients for years,
mandated mental health services for transit workers have been a long time
coming. Tolman, the union vice president, recalls finding little support available
after his first fatal accident as a railroad operator, in the 1980s. Now many
major railroads provide psychological resources through employee assistance
programs, such as Metro-North and Amtrak.
In March 2014, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) announced
a rule that American railroads must each put in place a “critical incident
stress plan” to address the mental health needs of employees after accidents.
That mandate came out of the 2008 Rail Safety Improvement Act. A spokesman for the FRA
tells Newsweek that the railroads have until June 2015 to submit their
proposals for the stress plans, and that not all have done so yet.
“At the very least, there should be an offer of treatment,
an offer of consultation and an offer of time off,” says Patrick Sherry,
executive director of the National Center for Intermodal Transportation and
author of the 2011 report.
Sherry says transportation authorities still have a ways to
go in providing adequate mental health care. While there are “lots of brochures
and pamphlets and things like that out there,” he says, more preemptive
training should be done for dealing with trauma and recognizing the behavioral
health warning signs. “I’m not aware of any standard training approach for
operating personnel,” he says.
Union leaders have been in touch with William Rockefeller,
the engineer from the 2013 derailment, in recent days. Last October, the NTSB announced it had determined that Rockefeller’s undiagnosed
sleep apnea, which led him to fall asleep at the controls, was the probable
main cause of the derailment. Anthony Bottalico of the Association of Commuter
Rail Employees tells Newsweek that Rockefeller has not yet returned to work at
the railroad.
Rockefeller’s union also represents the engineer, conductor
and other workers involved in the February 4 crash. “The last 19 months have
been the most difficult years in the history of this railroad and for our
members,” Bottalico wrote in an email to union members in the early hours of
February 5. He urged members to use their employee assistance programs if
needed and to support one another.
As Newsweek reported last week,
there were 891 rail fatalities in 2013, according to the NTSB. The FRA counted 11,564 train
accidents and incidents for that year. The New York City subway had 145
“collision with individual” incidents in 2014. Fifty-eight of those people
died.
Rombom published a study in 2006 that described treating 70 subway
and bus workers who had experienced “12-9” incidents. The workers typically
returned to their jobs after two to three months; all returned within a year.
Despite treatment, transportation industry leaders say, it’s
hard to overcome the trauma. “You can revisit it in slow motion,” Tolman says.
“You just never forget.”
Source: http://www.newsweek.com