Snow, Whiteouts, and Orange.

[DHayward]

I wanted to bring to your attention what happened almost two years ago.

 

It was a cold evening, about 7:00 pm. At Wellington Terminal, the snow was falling hard. As it landed on the tracks, the maintenance crew tried franticly to get some old switch units unfrozen. Suddenly, everything went white. A snow squall.

 

To make matters worse, an inbound orange line train, heading into Wellington Station, was barreling down the line. The same line the workers were on.

 

Out of the three workers, only two returned home that night.

 

Heres the official story:

 

MEDFORD, Mass. (AP) -- An MBTA worker was killed Thursday night when he and two co-workers were hit by an inbound Orange Line train while they were clearing snow from tracks at the Wellington station in Medford.

 

 

Signal engineer Obioma Nna, 46, of Framingham, was killed. Michael Mason, 53, of Halifax, and Peter Lee, 46, of Wakefield, were injured when the train hit them around 7 p.m., T spokesman Joe Pesaturo said. A weekend blizzard, followed by a midweek storm, had dumped more than two feet of snow on the region.

"A northbound train had passed by just prior to this incident and kicked up a lot of snow," he said. "There may have been a mini-whiteout condition."

Mason was in stable condition at Massachusetts General Hospital with non-life threatening injuries, Pesaturo said. Lee was brought to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center with a minor shoulder injury.

MBTA workers were struggling with the loss of Nna, Pesaturo said.

"A lot of his co-workers are having a tough time dealing with this right now, we all are at the MBTA, all 6,000 employees," he said.

This all unfolding, when I was curled up in a chair watching television. Much less than a mere half a mile away. I saw a helicopter hovering around my area. Little did I know it was to cover such a tragedy.

 

Well, the T came up with a nifty way of warning folks from approaching trains. Along with the Orange Line's bright orange color, any unused couplers on the front, and ends of trains, were covered with a highly visible orange, semi-reflective sleeve. They put them on annually around the winter time.

 

I just wanted to share my little story with you guys.. I was thinking back, and this one came to mind. I think it was appropriate to post, even though it happened years ago.

 

 

(I couldn't find a credit for this picture, but let it be known it was not taken by me, but by the BOSTON GLOBE NEWSPAPER)