After more than seven weeks since the tunnel flooding incident at Bishan MRT station, SMRT finally concluded its internal investigations and disciplinary inquiry.
The findings revealed that 13 staff were responsible for their failure to properly maintain the pump — a failure that led to train services on the North-South Line being shut down for over 20 hours on Oct 7 after the underground train station flooded from heavy rain. The public transport operator has since fired eight of the staff members responsible, comprising of five technical staff who falsified pump maintenance records, as well as two managers and a senior executive who failed to ensure the maintenance was duly carried out.
SMRT even named and shamed the upper management responsible for the grave error:
“Investigations have also found that Vice President Tay Tien Seng and Senior Manager Ivan Kok had failed to exercise sufficient supervision during the period when the falsification of the pump maintenance records occurred,” SMRT wrote.
“As they are no longer with the company, SMRT reserves its right to pursue legal action against them as may be appropriate.”
Cold.
In addition to those fired, the company has also “disciplined” three other management executives for their failure to exercise “due care and diligence expected of them”.
An internal investigation revealed that there were instances of falsified records of scheduled maintenance works by the assigned team between December 2016 and June 2017, meaning more than a few months went by without any works actually done. Considering about 250,000 commuters were left stranded from the flooding (that could have been easily prevented), we’d say that SMRT’s dismissal and disciplining of the staff responsible was justified.
In a press statement, SMRT assured that it’s since made “critical personnel changes” to the management and maintenance team, as well as strengthened supervisory processes.
“A Joint Readiness Inspection team has been set up to ensure that maintenance and asset replacement are independently audited and monitored in a systematic way. Third-party Qualified Persons and Subject Matter Experts are being engaged to enhance quality control surveillance of all maintenance activities and conduct a system-wide review of critical systems.”
Big, bold moves; but only time will tell if it’ll do anything to change things for the better within SMRT.
