Passenger Trains > Critically injured Amtrak worker battles to go home

Critically injured Amtrak worker from Ronkonkoma battles to go home

by Alfonso A. Castillo
February 10, 2018

A Ronkonkoma volunteer firefighter and Navy veteran is fighting life-threatening injuries, including the amputation of his hands, after suffering an electrical shock while working as an Amtrak lineman last month in Penn Station, his family said.

Robert Zimmerman, 45, was working near tracks 12 and 13 at Penn on the morning of Jan. 11 when his left hand made contact with a live overhead catenary wire that provides power to some trains, according to his wife Christine Zimmerman. The father of three absorbed 12,000 volts of electricity, but survived, his wife said, in part because metal in his body from a spinal surgery helped keep the current away from his heart and other vital organs.

“My husband is a very, very strong man,” Christine Zimmerman, 44, said, speaking during her first day home after being at her husband’s bedside around the clock for three weeks. “He’s more concerned with me and the boys and making sure that we’re OK. He does not feel sorry for himself. He’s not that guy. He just wants to get better. And our goal is just to get him out of the hospital alive.”

In a statement, an Amtrak spokesman confirmed that “an engineering employee was injured Jan. 11 while working in New York Penn Station,” but said he was unable to comment further. “The cause of the injury is under investigation.”

Amtrak chief engineer Gery Williams has said the injury was unrelated to the ongoing infrastructure renewal project at Penn Station.

Zimmerman’s injury highlights the dangers of working on the railroad. According to the Federal Railroad Administration, there were 3,803 reported on-duty injuries or deaths to railroad workers in 2017 — down from 4,052 in 2016.

“The railroad atmosphere in general is a very unforgiving one. It requires you to be on your toes at all times. Everything moves fast. It’s heavy. It can be energized,” said Robert Halstead, a Syracuse-based railroad accident reconstruction expert and investigator. “But there also is a strong set of safety rules that are designed to ameliorate those risks, if they are properly followed.”

Since Zimmerman’s injury, he has undergone 10 surgeries at Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan, and remains in intensive care there. As infection has spread, doctors removed most of his left arm up to near his shoulder, his right hand, and a toe, and he has battled back from cardiac arrest, kidney failure and other medical complications, his wife said.

Christine Zimmerman said she didn’t fully appreciate the risks of the job until her husband’s accident. Through tears, she recalled signing the paperwork to allow doctors to “cut his hands off.”

It was a difficult twist of fate for Zimmerman, who relied on his hands during his 12-year stint in the Navy, another dozen years working as a locomotive engineer for the Long Island Rail Road and as an emergency medical technician for the Lakeland Fire Department. He also was a football and baseball coach for his three sons, Andrew Grogan, 26— also an Amtrak lineman — Anthony, 19, and Joseph, 16.

“He said, ‘How am I going to hug you anymore? . . . How am I going to pitch to Joe? I can’t even catch a ball for him anymore,’ ” said Christine Zimmerman. “My husband gets up and goes to work. That’s his thing . . . He does everything with his hands.”

The National Transportation Safety Board in November issued a report criticizing the “weak safety culture” at Amtrak after its probe of an April 2016 crash in Pennsylvania that killed two Amtrak employees.

“These safety shortcomings occurred across several levels of the Amtrak organization — maintenance of way, dispatchers, management — and reveal Amtrak’s weak safety management,” the report read, in part.

With Zimmerman, a Brentwood native, still suffering “agonizing pain” and likely to undergo several more surgeries, including skin grafts, his wife said it’s too early to predict what the future may hold and whether he’ll be able to benefit one day from prosthetic hands.

She expects their home of 18 years will have to undergo major renovations, including to allow her husband to use his feet to control the bathroom sink and shower. A GoFundMe campaign to support the Zimmerman family has already raised more than $33,000 of its $100,000 goal.

Her goal, and what she prays for every day, “is just to get him home with whatever he has left,” Christine Zimmerman said. “And we’ll get through the rest.”

https://www.newsday.com/long-island/suffolk/amtrak-lineman-electrocuted-1.16671553

The “weak safety culture” are just words so let me put it into an image that some might better understand. You have a four track high speed electrified main line and one track has a program for under-cutting the track to clean the ballast. A contractor owns the large on-rack machine with several workers that walk along the side of it and onto adjacent tracks. And Amtrak has a backhoe with an operator and supervisor also working over the adjacent track. The track they are working on is long term out of service. The adjacent to this work was posted with the speed of 110 MPH and no restriction was put on that track regardless of it being next to the under-cutter machine. In past years that adjacent track would be bulletin ordered to 30 MPH at the most.

A signal maintainer could have been used to grind both rails on the adjacent track to install a positive contact jumper between rails with a large knife switch attached to a high flag. When the knife switch is in position to shunt all signals current a flag is up. This is back up to required procedure to obtain authorized track time to foul over that adjacent track. Just using clamp jumper wires to shunt is not safe, and the workers avoided their use as they were so hard to make good contact through scale on the rails.

The two dead employees also failed to confirm the track usage authority on the change over shift. They failed to ask for their own authority and proceed to use the prior trick authority which was later pulled down, and released to the dispatcher who gave clear block to the train, with no bulletin speed restriction.

Very sad.

Although this sounds like Mr Zinneman's lawyer wrote the article, the failure to hand over a track block, and other problems sound familiar.

Posted from Android

If someone is working on a track with catenary, the wires should be de-energized while the work is in progress. No one should be working near live wires!

Unsafe At Any Speed

---

DavidJustinLynch Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> If someone is working on a track with catenary,
> the wires should be de-energized while the work is
> in progress. No one should be working near live
> wires!


That is not true as linemen for power companies do all the time, work off of a platform attached to a helicopter, also a bucket truck. The problem becomes how they do the work. Have watched a crew do work by my house as knew the foreman on it. They did a briefing first, checked equipment designated who did what and checked each others equipment before doing any work. So seems that some type of breakdown took place here and that's what caused the problem not a live wire.

DavidJustinLynch Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> If someone is working on a track with catenary,
> the wires should be de-energized while the work is
> in progress. No one should be working near live
> wires!

Your lack of experience in any kind of industrial application is dreadfully obvious

Posted from iPhone

PlyWoody Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The “weak safety culture” are just words so
> let me put it into an image that some might better
> understand. You have a four track high speed
> electrified main line and one track has a program
> for under-cutting the track to clean the ballast.
> A contractor owns the large on-rack machine with
> several workers that walk along the side of it and
> onto adjacent tracks. And Amtrak has a backhoe
> with an operator and supervisor also working over
> the adjacent track. The track they are working on
> is long term out of service. The adjacent to this
> work was posted with the speed of 110 MPH and no
> restriction was put on that track regardless of it
> being next to the under-cutter machine. In past
> years that adjacent track would be bulletin
> ordered to 30 MPH at the most.
>
> A signal maintainer could have been used to grind
> both rails on the adjacent track to install a
> positive contact jumper between rails with a large
> knife switch attached to a high flag. When the
> knife switch is in position to shunt all signals
> current a flag is up. This is back up to required
> procedure to obtain authorized track time to foul
> over that adjacent track. Just using clamp jumper
> wires to shunt is not safe, and the workers
> avoided their use as they were so hard to make
> good contact through scale on the rails.
>
> The two dead employees also failed to confirm the
> track usage authority on the change over shift.
> They failed to ask for their own authority and
> proceed to use the prior trick authority which was
> later pulled down, and released to the dispatcher
> who gave clear block to the train, with no
> bulletin speed restriction.

No idea what this has to do with Mr. Zimmerman. My thoughts are with him to recover as much as he can!

High-voltage electricians at Allied Chemical and Bethlehem Steel worked HV apparatus "hot." I was just a helper at the time and wasn't allowed anywhere near the HV workplace.
This was way back when, when Allied and Beth Steel were operating 24/7/365 and equipment downtime cost a fortune.

BAB Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> DavidJustinLynch Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > If someone is working on a track with catenary,
> > the wires should be de-energized while the work
> is
> > in progress. No one should be working near live
> > wires!
>
>
> That is not true as linemen for power companies
> do all the time, work off of a platform attached
> to a helicopter, also a bucket truck. The problem
> becomes how they do the work. Have watched a crew
> do work by my house as knew the foreman on it.
> They did a briefing first, checked equipment
> designated who did what and checked each others
> equipment before doing any work. So seems that
> some type of breakdown took place here and that's
> what caused the problem not a live wire.

Having worked 40 years as a Journeyman Lineman both for a electrical utility and contractors I wholeheartedly agree with your comment. It appears corners were cut although the article was lacking details.

DavidJustinLynch Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> If someone is working on a track with catenary,
> the wires should be de-energized while the work is
> in progress. No one should be working near live
> wires!

In a perfect world where everyone has absolute respect for one another and no one is in a hurry and everyone except maintenance workers are home in bed between 10 PM and 6 AM every day so that any/all maintenance work can be done unimpeded during absolute work shutdowns, sure.

But here in reality, that would be both impractical and impossible.

PlyWoody Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The “weak safety culture” are just words so
> let me put it into an image that some might better
> understand...

I deleted most of this post because it has nothing to do with the cited article. Also, adjacent tracks don't slow to 30 mph for an undercutter on Amtrak. I've been told they slow to 80 mph for the Track Laying Machine. There were several failures at Chester, PA, but they weren't the speed of a passing train.