Talk:2017 Washington train derailment

There is no "consensus" against my opinions.

Contrary to Bratland's assertion, clumsily made on my Talk page, there is no "consensus" against my position. I challenged NPOV-violations by others, and they still haven't explained why their vague and undefended positions are valid. The reality is, in WP the material inserted in the voice of WP is not supposed to take sides. Anybody who has claimed otherwise needs to come out and explain why he has made that egregious error. THEY are the ones who are edit-warring. And they shouldn't try to hide behind their tricks to shut off discussion, after they have already lost the debate. Do they ACTUALLY have the authority to do that? 2601:1C2:4E02:3020:4146:2231:C4F1:8E76 (talk) 22:32, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. The thread is IP accusing everyone of bias, malfeasance, skullduggery. Will not drop stick. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 00:23, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

People in cars

RE: Addition and removal of cars & car passengers, in infobox fields for train crew and passengers.

We need to use more of the fields in Template:Infobox public transit accident.

<!-- Statistics     -->
| bus                 = 
| trains              = 
| vehicles            = 
| passengers          = 
| crew                = 
| pedestrians         = 
| deaths              = 
| injuries            = 
| damage              = 
| property            = 

The template isn't sufficently docuemnted (we should fix that) but it looks like we want to better use | deaths = , | injuries = and | vehicles = . I'ts not clear if these are intended only for other vehicle occupants who were killed or injuries, or if it includes those in accident-related vehicles who were not injured. Let's stuff the info we have into these fields as best we can, and then go edit the template to add fields that we need. And document it. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 20:18, 13 July 2019 (UTC)

NTSB does not assign blame?

Parroting the NTSB's bureaucratic, legalistic language, where they prefer to passive voice, avoiding directly assigning agency to actions, is against Wikipedia policy. The WP:NOTCENSORED policy isn't only about not saying bad words. It's about stating facts in plain English and not obfuscating the truth. WP:EUPHEMISM is derived from this: we don't say "passed away", we say "died". This is also a good example of why we mostly rely on WP:SECONDARY sources to interpret primary sources for us. The primary source -- the NTSB report and its press releases -- can and do obfuscate the truth for arcane legalistic and bureaucratic reasons. A good secondary source, The Seattle Times in this case, correctly interprets and summarizes to give readers a plain reading. So the obscurantism of the press release language, "Failure to provide an effective mitigation for a hazardous curve and inadequate training of a locomotive engineer led to the overspeed derailment" is restated by the Times as "the safety board placed primary blame for the crash on Sound Transit, which owns the $181 million corridor, for failing to require safety improvements near the curve".

A passive voice phrase like "Failure to provide an effective mitigation" raises the question: who failed to provide it? ST. After beating around the bush, the press release does gets around to saying so: "Central Puget Sound Regional Transit Authority failed to adequately address the hazard". And: "The NTSB determined the engineer had insufficient training on both the route and the equipment." Whose job is it to train the engineer? Sound Transit. That is blame. The NTSB blamed the accident on Sound Transit.

Use plain English, not bureaucratese. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 23:10, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation. To clarify my intentions, in case this was a misunderstanding: I didn't make that edit merely because the NTSB failed to say they blamed anyone; rather, the NTSB explicitly states in all of its final reports that "The NTSB does not assign fault or blame for an accident or incident ...". Perhaps this is just some boilerplate using a legalistic definition of "blame" that implies liability, while "blame" as used in the article is a more colloquial sense. But this can still be seen to contradict what the NTSB says about what it does.

That said, I can see how my edit made the sentence too passive. Would it be better to say "The NTSB determined that the probable cause was Sound Transit's failure ..." (which is similar to how they say it in their report), even if that might have a similar meaning to the average reader as "The NTSB blamed Sound Transit for its failure ...", or is that still too bureaucratic? (cathartid - talk) 03:15, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

I don't see how making the language more cagey and legalistic helps the encyclopedia reader in any way. While primary and tertiary sources are often acceptable, one reason we generally favor secondary sources, and follow their lead, is that the clear, straightforward tone and language of secondary sources matches the tone and language we aim for in an encyclopedia. An encyclopedia's purpose is not to assign legal liability or prosecute wrongdoing, and for that reason we have no need to carefully wend our way through a minefield of loaded legal terminology. The plain English version from the Times, and in the current version of this article, does that just fine. We don't need to weaken or blunt the statements of facts for the sake of some hypothetical legalistic bugaboo. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 04:45, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

I disagree with the rhetorical assignment of blame to ST. A newspaper report is not a reliable secondary source for interpreting crash reports. The NTSB identifies what went wrong. The ST plan was to mitigate the curve with PTC, but that plan got delayed. The NTSB pointed out that waivers for PTC were for an entire railroad (Burlington) instead of particular routes such as ST's line. So does the blame belong at ST, Burlington (for seeking the blanket waiver), Amtrak (for manning new lines without PTC), the railroad authority (for granting the waiver), or Congress (for continually extending the PTC deadline and permitting broad waivers). The NTSB commented that the engineer was set up for failure, but how was he set up? The NTSB pointed out the engineer was qualified for revenue run, but that qualification was inadequate. There should have been more stringent requirements, but who should impose those requirements? Yes, it would be prudent if ST or Amtrak required more training, but that does not mean a similar lack-of-training accident would not happen in Pennsylvania, Illinois, or Texas. The NTSB staff discussed the problem of grandfathered equipment. Who is responsible for that? ST wanted to use old equipment to save money, the railroad authority (despite doubts from its staff) let them use the old equipment, and Congress allowed the railroad authority to grandfather. Glrx (talk) 21:18, 26 August 2019 (UTC)

Everything you just posted sounded like a bunch of opinions. Editors giving their own spin on what a primary source is telling us is exactly why WP:PRIMARY says to avoid using primary sources for anything but the most obvious, indisputable facts, and to only use secondary sources for interpretations. "Do not analyze, evaluate, interpret, or synthesize material found in a primary source yourself; instead, refer to reliable secondary sources that do so." If a the Seattle Times isn't an adequate secondary source (and why is that, exactly? Can you cite criticism of the Times coverage of the crash?) then can you cite a better secondary source? Even if the Times is adequate, if there's a better one, we should prefer that one. If a better one doesn't exist, then we should rely on what we have, the Times. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 23:33, 26 August 2019 (UTC)

Cause of accident?

I am pretty sure that, after 2 years of investigations, the cause was determined to be human error. Can anyone back this up?

HeritageUnitRailfan8098 (talk) 16:09, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

Sound Transit didn't mitigate the curve, and didn't train the locomotive engineer properly. I've restored that to the text, and added it to the first sentence so It's not vague any more. You can call that "human error" I guess; I'm not sure how you mean that term.

The papers reported in plain English that the NTSB blamed the crash on Sound Transit for failing to mitigate the curve, and for inadequate training of the crew. One of the problems with Wikipedia is the desire to project gravitas and elevate the style to sound wise and kind of stuffy. Sadly, sometimes that passive voice academic tone is considered "good writing". The result is to obscure what should be plain facts. The main effect of passive voice is agaency avoidance. Instead of "person did thing" we write "thing happened". Who did it? *shrug*

The Seattle Times said it, in plain English, using the word "blame", and per the WP:NOR policy at WP:SECONDARY, our job is to hew close to that. It may be true that the official language of an NTSB report might be to avoid such direct wording (although the did no such thing in this case), it doesn't matter for us, because that's a classic example of why we avoid our own interpretations of WP:PRIMARY sources and shift to secondary sources in any case where the precise meaning of a primary document is under question. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 18:48, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

Blame assigned to Amtrak by Judge March 24, 2021

https://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/article250078149.html "Superior Court Judge Karena Kirkendoll granted Brown’s motion for partial summary judgment in the case March 12, which asked her to find Amtrak “strictly liable,” and to dismiss Amtrak’s “sole cause defense.” " Allassa37 (talk) 08:47, 25 March 2021 (UTC)