One year ago, during the Tomb Sweeping Day holiday, a crane truck used to carry out remedial engineering works adjacent to a section of the Taiwan Railways Administration’s (TRA) east coast main line in Hualien County slid down a slope onto the tracks. A TRA Taroko Express train traveling eastward from New Taipei City to Taitung slammed into the crane truck. The crash killed 49 people and injured more than 200 people.
On the one-year anniversary of the incident, aside from displaying sympathy for families who have lost their loved ones, what reforms have bureaucrats introduced to ensure that such a disaster would never occur again?
Since the crash, a number of incidents have occurred involving engineering works near TRA railway tracks. Most of these have involved collisions between construction machinery and vehicles.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications and the TRA said they have improved existing regulations governing the safety and management of engineering and construction work close to railway lines to more clearly define access controls into work areas. This falls far short of the systemic reforms that are required to reduce the risk from engineering work close to railway lines.
Any construction or civil engineering work that occurs close to railway tracks is, by definition, high risk. This risk can only be mitigated through careful project management and project monitoring.
The ministry had passed the “Measures for prohibiting and restricting construction on either side of railway lines.” At present, local governments, MRT corporations and Taiwan High Speed Rail (THSR) all carry out project risk assessments and evaluation of construction plans according to these measures. However, the TRA has not yet fully incorporated the measures into its own risk assessment procedures for work near railway tracks.
Despite last year’s devastating accident, the ministry still allows two separate trackside construction management systems to operate in parallel. The discrepancy between the robustness of the two systems is starkly reflected in the frequency of accidents and the number of casualties on the TRA network compared with those of the THSR and MRT networks.
Comprehensive safety impact assessment and monitoring of construction work adjacent to railway facilities is essential as it makes construction personnel aware of the impact their work has on the safety and operation of adjacent railway facilities, rather than simply focusing on safety within the confines of the construction site. By way of analogy, a surgeon must control a patient’s blood pressure and heart rate at the same time to ensure the safety of a surgical procedure.
The overall length of tracks under the jurisdiction of the TRA is longer than that of the THSR and local MRT networks combined, while the types of railway vehicles it operates are also more complex. The TRA also has to integrate four major systems within its network: transportation, engineering, systems and electrical power. Furthermore, given the TRA’s long history, it suffers from institutional inertia: Integrating new regulations and concepts is an uphill struggle and there is an ingrained resistance to change.
If the TRA cannot even modernize its management of trackside construction in line with basic standards already followed by the THSR and the MRT systems, it seems that the problem cannot be solved through corporatization alone: There is an attitudinal and cultural problem at the heart of the TRA.
Johnson Kung is a civil engineer.
Translated by Edward Jones
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