Who's putting their foot on the neck of Metro? A good question by a victim's family.

Families of deceased passengers on the Red Line train which crashed violently outside the Fort Totten stop last June inched closer toward justice this week as more of the truth of the cause of the disaster was published by the National Transportation Safety Board. We have known for some time that the lead car to crumpled 63 feet, losing about 84 percent of its survivable space, and taking the lives of nine people in that car. One board member pointed to failures up and down the organizational chart of METRO.

Here is what we now know:
1) Metro had pledged to run a software test for flaws each month but had no record of doing so.
2) Metro developed a three-point test that would have found the Fort Totten track circuit flaw, but staff did not use the procedure even in the days leading up to the crash.
3) Metro had about 3,000 alarms per week that showed circuits were vacant when a train was there, caused by an estimated 100 faulty circuits. But it ignored such alarms, designating them "minor" and creating a system to automatically delete them after 60 seconds.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/local/Metro-safety-_breakdown_-led-to-crash_-NTSB-says-1004176-99420504.html