This is the choice that faced Kendra Hillmer and dozens of fellow passengers on the Blue Line train that derailed and ground to a halt in a blackened subway tunnel Tuesday: stay put as smoke filled her car or leave and try to grope her way to safety through the dark.
Emergency lights had come on and an acrid metallic smell began to fill the eight-car train.
A sign posted on the wall informed passengers to listen for instructions in an emergency, remain on the train, move to another car if they felt threatened and exit only if instructed to do so. But no instructions were forthcoming, at least none that Hillmer and others in the middle cars could hear.
“Some people said open the doors; some said keep it closed,” Hillmer, a 28-year-old Bucktown resident, said Wednesday. “They weren’t screaming, but they were panicking. No one knew what was going on.”
And that is the dilemma often faced by those trapped in emergencies. Stay or go? Follow the posted protocols or don’t? Wait for instructions or act? Much of it to be decided in a split second.
Safety instructions are formulated to play the odds. They represent the opinion of experts about what behaviors will bring about the best likelihood of keeping safe.
But sometimes going by the book can prove fatal. Those who stayed put as instructed on the lower floors of the World Trade Center might have been saved had they tried to flee. The six victims who died in a stairwell during the 2003 fire at a Cook County-owned office building in the Loop were following evacuation instructions blared on the building’s public address system. Had they stayed put, they would have been saved.
In each case, people were faced with agonizing decisions to be made under difficult circumstances.
“This is an art, not a science,” cautioned Patrick Crawford, the Midwest director for James Lee Witt and Associates, a public safety consulting firm founded by a former federal emergency preparedness director.
In Tuesday’s accident, the O’Hare-bound train had derailed and the motorman was heading toward the back to check out the problem when he ran into passengers headed in the other direction who told him about the smoke and flames. He quickly ordered those around him to evacuate the train via a subway catwalk. But he never got on the public address system to tell the passengers who weren’t in earshot.
Several passengers remained hospitalized Wednesday, including two in critical condition.
City and federal officials on Wednesday praised the motorman for being quick to act in the emergency. “The bottom line is people were able to get out,” said CTA President Frank Kruesi.
But many passengers were upset that they heard nothing and were forced to make a decision that the posted instructions appeared to caution against.
Hillmer, in the middle of the train when the derailment occurred, said she heard no messages or instructions for Chicago Transit Authority personnel. Her options were limited to waiting inside a smoke-filled train or barreling out the door of a nearby car into a pitch-black tunnel.
There was a momentary debate among passengers in Hillmer’s car, but it ended quickly when they could see other cars empty out. “I think some people decided what to do and everyone else just followed,” she said. “You can’t just sit there and let the smoke fill up the car. We knew we had to do something.”
Another rider, Naperville resident Om Goel, 62, said he followed a passenger out of the car.
“We couldn’t go back because of the smoke, the fireworks,” Goel said. “The decision was easy. Most of the people were leaving.”
“I didn’t even know if the tunnel was safe, or if it was dangerous to leave the car.”
“Around the third train car there was a door on the right hand side that opened in the middle of the crowd. Someone went out and the crowd just followed. … But we didn’t know where the heck we were going.”
The group started walking along a thin ledge, holding onto a rail in the dark tunnel.
“We didn’t know where the ledge would take us.”
Goel said he walked the ledge for about 20 minutes before escaping through an emergency hatch onto the street.
Tuesday was hardly the first time the CTA had been accused by passengers of leaving them in the dark in an emergency.
In 1995, hundreds of passengers on a Red Line train disabled south of the Clark/Division Station pulled an emergency door opener and walked out into the subway catwalk after smoke poured from the undercarriage. Some passengers later complained the crew failed to instruct them on what to do until after they had exited, and then told them to get back on the smoky train.
More Top Picks Best Instant Pots
“It is very frightening to be in a trapped area underground with so many people,” one passenger complained at the time. “I had to do what I had to do, and I disobeyed the CTA.”
Despite praise from the city and CTA on the motorman’s actions, the same decisions would have violated standard protocol on New York City’s transit system. There, operators must announce a problem to passengers on the public address system, according to agency spokesman Charles Seaton.
But no two emergencies are alike, and Crawford, the public safety consultant, said it is critical that safety officials know not only the procedures and protocols drilled into them but also how to adapt. “Every situation is different, and you need to go on the best information you have,” he said.
Key to preventing panic and maximizing safety is communication, he said.
“You can never have enough,” said Marilyn Bolton, a spokeswoman for the Toronto Transit Commission, whose control center allows workers there to broadcast announcements to train passengers.
That system is used when the operator and the conductor are busy attending to a sick passenger, for example, or carrying out an evacuation.
Cortez Trotter, Chicago’s emergency response chief, said the city will look into the possibility of installing such a system at the CTA control center.
Following the World Trade Center disaster, New York began marking pathways to building exits with photo-luminescent material. Crawford said many subway systems are looking at copying that approach in tunnels as a way to help passengers navigate their way to safety in emergencies.
Millions of commuters ride transit systems across the nation each day, and it is impractical to run them through safety drills. But Crawford said the Metro system in the Washington D.C. area is doing it on a small scale.
The system has taken small squads of frequent transit riders and given them special instruction on what to do in emergencies.
“If you have people with core competency in emergency response, that increases the chances that you’re going to have folks on any given train who have some familiarity with the tunnels,” he said. “That can be a force multiplier.”
———-