Anybody who rides Silicon Valley public transportation knows the eclectic experience of traveling via the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA).  From tardy buses to drunken fights, graffiti to sleeping transients, and unidentifiable stains to vomit, you never know what you’re going to get when you step aboard one of the VTA’s fine vehicles. However, what I didn’t expect on my ride home the night of March 21 was a train wreck.

I was one of 29 passengers aboard a light rail train that derailed near the Virginia station, injuring four people and blocking trains for nearly 12 hours. The first indication that something was amiss occurred when the operator stopped the train at the track crossover after the Virginia station. She unlocked one of the doors and hopped down beside the train, walked around the outside of the vehicle, stopped to fiddle with something on the left side of the car, and then got back on.

The next thing I knew, the whole train jerked backwards. People started screaming as the lights went out and the front section of the car I was in swung off the track, grinding and screeching to the left before loudly banging into one of the light rail electricity poles. The floor and the accordion-like connector on the midsection of the light rail car ripped apart, exposing sky above and the train’s gears below. Everybody on the train was in shock, with many crying and a few hurt. After a short while it became apparent that nobody from the VTA was coming to help us. The doors weren’t working, so all the passengers had to climb through the rip in the side of the train to get out. In a daze, we meandered on the rocks at the side of the train for about 15 minutes, freeway cars rushing by.

Standing there on the tracks, with the potential of another train coming or the electric lines falling, I realized the danger of our situation. Desperate for some leadership, I spotted the operator walking around front of the train. I went over to her and asked what she recommended we do. To my astonishment, she just mumbled, “I don’t know,” and continued to walk away. Seeing a VTA traffic director in the distance, I jogged over to him and asked what we should do. He just continued to talk on his walky-talky, motioning in the direction of a light rail car sitting on the tracks about a quarter-mile away. After about 40 minutes, most of my fellow passengers and I had found our way over to the sitting train. The VTA traffic director then came onboard and asked if anybody was hurt. A young woman, who had been limping, started sobbing when he asked, holding up a badly bruised arm. The train was then shuttled to the Tamien Station, where we all got off and emergency crews were called.

Before that Friday evening, I had always assumed that whether you’re riding a bus, a rickshaw or an airplane, the operator would be in charge if there was an emergency. During this accident, VTA staff was MIA. The thing that scared me the most was how disorganized and incompetent the VTA was following the derailment. Nobody told the passengers what to do, nobody told us to get out of the train, and nobody told us not to stand in the middle of the tracks. We had to find our own way to safety in the nearby sitting train. For all we knew, another train could have come whizzing by and crashed into the derailed train, or the electric lines could fallen down. As of March 24, the VTA has put the train’s operator and traffic director at the time of the accident on paid leave. An investigation has ruled out mechanical or equipment failure as the cause of the derailment.

On my light rail trip home the following Monday night, I noticed that the VTA staff had significantly stepped up their rail crossover security measures. Before the derailment, VTA traffic monitoring attendants usually just sat in parked trains in the retrofitting construction zones, eating lunch or reading the newspaper, occasionally glancing up to wave the train drivers through the zones. Now, the VTA traffic-monitoring attendants look alive; they’re stopping trains and talking to drivers, actually making sure that they receive validation to cross the tracks.

Good job guys. It only took a train wreck and four injured people for you to wake up and do your job.

Jessica Fromm is a San Jose State University journalism student and intern at Metro Silicon Valley. Currently a junior, she made the Dean’s List this semester and lives in Morgan Hill.