Pushing the radio emergency alarm buttons is not currently a part of Metro's emergency protocols and cause distractions in the Rail Operations Control Center, Metro said. Workers are supposed to verbally call in emergency over the radio.

WASHINGTON — Metrorail workers pushed radio emergency alarm buttons more than 6,400 times over 20 months without getting a response, Metro’s Inspector General found.

The alarms, which Metro said are not currently a proper part of emergency protocols, are now being disabled to further reduce distractions in the Rail Operations Control Center. Instead, workers are supposed to radio-in to the Rail Operations Control Center, or ROCC, that they have an emergency. However, Inspector General Geoffrey Cherrington’s office found the buttons were often pressed because radio transmissions were not getting a response.

An evaluation of the emergency alarms released this week by Metro’s Office of Inspector General began after the office learned of the potentially “serious safety issue” during a radio training class.

“Inappropriate use of the emergency alarm button coupled with inaction of the ROCC, could result in non-response to a real emergency situation, thereby adversely impacting the safety of employees, contractors, and rail passengers,” the report said.

When the buttons were pressed, they set off alarms at all 12 desks in the control center and disrupted communications until the alarms were cleared. The buttons also triggered a notification to all radios on that channel that an emergency was in progress.

Since 2015, when the Federal Transit Administration again warned that the controllers faced far too many alarms and distractions to do their jobs properly, the inspector general’s report said Metro has reduced the total number of alarms to controllers from more than 654,000 per week to 41,669 per week.

In the case of the radio emergency button, which is expected to remain active on Metro Transit Police Radios, the report found that there were no policies or procedures for rail workers on the button’s use and a false impression from training about what happens when the button is pressed.

“WMATA officials indicated users are often frustrated when they cannot contact the ROCC on the radio, so they press the emergency button to connect to the ROCC quicker. Calls are sometimes not answered immediately because ROCC employees are often on other calls,” the report said.

Rail controllers also had no standard operating procedure to follow when the alarms popped up on their consoles, so the alerts were regularly cleared without raising any concerns that there may be a real issue.

Even if the controllers did respond to the alarm, they would have to radio the worker to find out his or her location and what the emergency was.

“The ROCC does not act on radio alarms because there are so many of them and nobody responds to the dispatcher from the field,” the report found.

A maintenance radio channel had 3,180 emergency alarm button presses between Oct. 2015 and Jun. 2017, while the Red Line radio channel had the second most with 1,728.

“The majority of the alarms generated by pushing the emergency alarm button are not ‘real’ emergencies and can be considered false positives. Notwithstanding the false positives, some of them may be real emergencies,” the report said.

Metro General Manager Paul Wiedefeld said Thursday that disabling the emergency buttons, which can also be pressed accidentally, will ensure proper radio procedures are followed.

“We have protocols when there’s emergencies that you’re to follow, and for operators, or for maintenance people like that, it’s not pushing that button,” Wiedefeld said.

The radio emergency alarms are all due to be disabled by Nov. 1, which Cherrington said would address his office’s concerns about the button.

“While the emergency alarm capability exists in the current radio system, it was determined that the addition of a new emergency protocol for which false positives would be difficult to control was not efficient,” Metro managers wrote Cherrington Sept. 1.

Had Metro kept the button active, he recommended significant new training and procedures, along with additional staff in the Rail Operations Control Center, including maintenance operations. Metro has already promised to hire new staff there in coming years.