Update: Two BART Employees Struck and Killed By Train Near Walnut Creek Station

BART Assistant General Manager Paul Oversier talked to media at the accident scene in Walnut Creek but refused to answer questions as to whether this accident had anything to do with the safety issues that unions have been raising during recent contract negotiations.

"We just lost two people in the BART family," Oversier said. "I'm not going to go there now."

Fatalities of BART employees are rare. The deaths are the 6th and 7th in the transit agency's 40-year history.

The last employee death occurred around this time of year not far from Saturday's incident. James Strickland, a BART inspector, was struck from behind by a train traveling 70 mph on Oct. 14, 2008 while performing a routine inspection on the tracks between the Concord and Pleasant Hill stations. BART reportedly had assigned trains headed in opposite directions to a shared track for routine maintenance.

Posted earlier

"We are like firefighters and police officers. When one of ours goes down, we all take it hard, even if we are having a disagreement," said Hassan Shaheed, an operations supervisor with one of BART's unions.

The employees were performing track inspections in response to a report of a dip in the track. Both people had extensive experience working around moving trains in both the freight train and the rapid transit industry. The procedures involved in track maintenance require one employee to inspect the track and the other to act as a lookout and notify of any oncoming traffic.

The train was on a routine maintenance run with an experienced operator at the controls. At the time of the accident the train was being run in automatic mode under computer control, BART said in a statement.

However, in the audio recording of the radio traffic between BART's central dispatch and Train 963, a woman can be heard specifically directing the train operator to "keep coming" and then to "slow down." She then says "stop," three times, the third time emphatically.