Who is the young man in the sports coat shown on a grainy videotape spilling mercury on a platform of the Red Line subway station at Pershing Square?
When it happened on Dec. 22, officials quickly labeled it a harmless accident.
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MTA admits subway spill errors
Agency waited eight hours to act after being told that mercury was on a Red Line platform. `Basic protocols weren't followed,' Molina says.
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But Thursday, officials acknowledged that the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority botched its response, waiting eight hours after being told mercury was on the platform before clearing the station and cleaning up the spill.
Police and transit officials said the workers erred by not immediately contacting law enforcement to cordon off the area and calling in hazardous-material experts.
The incident also exposed the fact that many MTA workers are not trained to handle dangerous materials such as mercury.
Though no one was injured, the incident marked the first time the MTA faced the release of a potentially hazardous substance in the subway system.
Saying that "basic protocols were not followed," MTA Chairwoman Gloria Molina on Thursday ordered an immediate investigation into what went wrong.
Several terrorism experts said Thursday that the MTA's handling of the incident was troubling.
"It's unnerving, a wake-up call," said USC professor James Moore, an expert in transportation and a researcher with USC's Terrorism Center.
"The lesson is that no matter how you slice it, the system isn't prepared to respond adequately. We really don't know what caused this failure, but we need to find out."
Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the MTA has repeatedly touted its beefed-up security measures and increased employee training. But the bulk of the $9 million spent to improve security has focused mostly on preventing a terrorist bombing.
"We deal with suspicious packages, abandoned packages, white powdery substances," said Sheriff's Cmdr. Dan Finkelstein, who oversees security for the transit authority. "This is something that's never happened before."
Finkelstein and others said MTA workers were caught unprepared by the released mercury because it was a scenario they had not dealt with.
"What we need to do is educate all levels throughout our system, whether it's intercom operators or maintenance staff, as well as bus or rail operators," Finkelstein added.
But county Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, a member of the MTA board, said workers shouldn't need special training to know that they should call 911 if someone says he dumped mercury in a subway station.
