WHAT HAPPENED AT POTTER’S BAR?

RMT helpline 0800 3763706 :: june 2010 :: RMTnews 17 Seven people died and seventy-six people were injured when the rear of a West Anglia Great Northern train from London to King's Lynn derailed at 1245 hours on May 10 2002, slammed into a bridge and came to a halt across platforms at Potters Bar station. RMT immediately called for a full public inquiry into crash which should include the organisation of rail maintenance as part of its remit, after six years of rail privatisation had fragmented the industry. RMT general secretary Bob Crow said at the time: “We need a public inquiry, not solely into the causes of the Potters Bar tragedy, but also into the shambolic way in which infrastructure maintenance is organised”. The Health and Safety Executive's report into the crash a year later also blamed flawed maintenance and ineffective safety checks. The private contractor tasked with maintaining the points at Potter’s Bar, Jarvis, had tried to claim that the crash was caused by sabotage. But the HSE said that it had found no evidence to support such speculation. Yet, while British Transport Police launched police raids on RMT members as part of the investigation, no Jarvis company directors were ever held legally responsible for deaths that occurred due to gross negligence. A three-year investigation by the Rail Safety and Standards Board later said shoddy maintenance was the likely cause. But calls by RMT and the bereaved for a full public inquiry into the accident – and that at Hatfield in October 2000 – have still proved unsuccessful. Eight years after the crash, Railtrack, the private company charged with maintaining the track has been replaced with the government-backed company Network Rail and Jarvis has gone bust. Judge Michael Findlay Baker QC, who is conducting the inquest, said that the delay of eight years between accident and inquest had been "extreme" and would have "protracted to an exceptional degree the distress of those who have been bereaved. "In their interest and in the more general public interest, there must be no more delay," he said. As the inquest began, Bob Crow pointed out that there had been major budget cuts on Network Rail’s safety-critical maintenance and renewals work with further attacks on funding to be announced by the government. “Those cuts will drag rail safety back to the dark days of Rail Track and make a repeat of the Potters Bar disaster an inevitability,” he warned. RMT senior assistant general secretary Mick Cash, who has many year’s experience of track working, made a statement to the inquest on behalf of the union. He explained the union’s view that significant contributory causes of the crash were a lack of coordination and mismanagement built into infrastructure maintenance contracts under privatisation. “This has resulted in inadequate maintenance and inspection training and a reduction in the number of maintenance workers and the increased use of sub- contractors all operating within a fragmented rail system,” he said. The inquest in Letchworth, Hertfordshire is expected to last three months. WHAT HAPPENED AT POTTER’S BAR? Just over eight years after a train derailed at Potter’s Bar after traveling over faulty points, an inquest into the deadly crash has finally opened