Two men killed on BART tracks, about 1:45 pm on Oct 19, 2013

[George Harris]

Two men were killed on the track on BART between Walnut Creek and Pleasant Hill stations. That is on the East Bay side. The tracks are at grade and parallel to a road at this location.

This is one of the better news articles:

[SIZE=medium]http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_24347327/two-bart-workers-killed-during-maintenance-work-strikehttp://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_24347327/two-bart-workers-killed-during-maintenance-work-strike[/SIZE]

There are quite a few news articles on the web. Many have as much warmed over information on the strike as they do on the accident. The highlights are that a train operating in automatic mode during shutdown and had not been told that the men were on the track.

I will not speculate. The NTSB is going to investigate.

Names have not yet been released. I have heard that one is a man that I know. He had been on track off and on for many years.

 

[Swadian Hardcore]

Sorry about what happened to your friend. No reason people should get killed during a strike.

 

[SarahZ]

That's so sad.

 

[George Harris]

The names have now been published. The NTSB people are now in town and the trainset has been moved.

Despite the men being described as if they were maintenance workers, they were not. They were both highly educated and experienced technical professionals.

The men were Lawrence E. Daniels and Christopher Sheppard. Larry was described as the "contractor" but his contract was a professional services contract. Christopher Sheppard was a Senior Track Engineer for BART. Whatever had them out on the track was something out of the ordinary.

 

[Ryan]

I'm sorry to hear that, George. Hopefully they can figure out what happened to prevent it from happening again.

Glad that the NTSB is staffed back up to investigate.