Brief monorail shutdown blamed on human error

Stephen Curran

Friday, Jan. 7, 2005 | 9:26 a.m.

Human error was to blame for the Las Vegas Monorail leaving a platform with a door open Wednesday afternoon, the system's first glitch since the $650 million system reopened Dec. 24, company and county officials said.

A technician for Bombardier Inc., the Canadian firm that built and operates the trains, apparently failed to adequately reset a door mechanism that had been interrupted when a passenger blocked a door leading from the elevated train to the platform outside the Sahara hotel, Ron Lynn, the county building official, said.

The oversight allowed the train to pull away from the station with one of the two doors ajar for a few seconds, Lynn said. Passengers were taken off the train at the Hilton platform, the next stop, while technicians inspected the train and ran the train once between the two stations, he said.

As required, monorail officials contacted the Clark County Building Division about an hour after the incident, Lynn said.

County engineers inspected the system Thursday morning and found the technician likely did not inform colleagues at the system's automated control center of the glitch, Lynn said.

"They all should have known," he said. "This is a fairly routine occurrence (that doors would need to be reset)."

The monorail company was not fined or cited in the incident, Lynn said, but county officials are requiring Bombardier to review its training procedures.

Todd Walker, a spokesman for the monorail company, estimated the technician's error was responsible for a 15- to 20-minute delay in normal operations.

Walker said the mistake did not indicate a malfunction for the system, which reopened after a three-month closure that began after a six-inch-wide washer fell from a moving train Sept. 8.

Wednesday's problem "wasn't really a door incident," Walker said. "It was human error."

Another Bombardier employee was blamed for the Aug. 16 opening of a set of doors facing a 25-foot drop while passengers were on board. No one was injured in that incident and the passengers inside were transferred to another car while it was inspected.

Walker and Lynn said this week's glitch did not appear related.

Since it reopened, the monorail has carried an estimated 500,000 passengers and has logged about 17,000 total miles since Dec. 24, Walker said.