Homeless Man Challenges Metrorail to Improve Safety

Inside a D.C. metro station, including train

Daniel Huizinga/Flickr

For more than two decades, I’ve gotten together with a good friend on a weekly basis. This man has helped me with all types of home improvement and maintenance projects and saved me a good bit of money. He is also an inventor, and I’ve been privy to some of his inventions and helped to improve them.

For the purposes of this article, I will refer to him as Muttaqa (the enlightened one). Ever since the death of Carol Glover, who died of smoke inhalation on the Metrorail, Muttaqa had been racking his brain to find a way to minimize the possibility of this happening in the future.

He came up with a device that he called the Tunnel Emergency Rescue Sled (TERS). This device can dramatically reduce the response time of emergency medical technicians to the person or people in need on Metrorail.

By design, it is stored folded and can be easily transported down an escalator or elevator. Once it reaches the nearest station to the patrons in need, the sled can be unfolded onto the rail so that the first responders can embark immediately, without waiting for the third, electrified, rail to be deactivated — saving precious response time and possibly lives. I believe it would have worked for Carol Glover if this advanced technology not only existed, but had been deployed.

Currently the technology exists, but Muttaqa has been challenged by bureaucratic responses from the patent office and apathetic responses from Metro. Financing is also a barrier. This article will give him a glimmer of hope that his idea will eventually reach the right people who will make this new advanced technology a reality to save future lives on the Metrorail.

We shall overcome!


Issues |Death|Health, Physical|Transportation

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