Negligence by SMRT crew tantamount to criminal offence, analyst says

SINGAPORE — The negligence of the SMRT crew responsible for the maintenance of a water pump system borders on a criminal offence, Dr Park Byung Joon said.

The urban transport expert from the Singapore University of Social Sciences was commenting on the preliminary findings of rail operator SMRT’s internal investigation into the flooding of MRT train tunnels after a rain storm on Oct 7. The report was released on Tuesday (Oct 31).

The findings showed that the crew responsible for the maintenance of the pump system at Bishan MRT Station had signed off and submitted maintenance records for nearly a year, without carrying out the works.

This was in the lead-up to the flooding-induced train service outage along the North-South Line.

Dr Park said that such negligence would be criminal in other countries such as South Korea. “If someone is committing this level of negligence, there could be some kind of crime,” he said. “Negligence is not just about bodily harm. A certain amount of monetary damage can also be constituted as a criminal offence.”

Members of Parliament (MPs) in the Transport Government Parliamentary Committee expressed shock and concern that such negligence could take place in the organisation.

Mountbatten MP Lim Biow Chuan said that the actions of the crew are “downright unacceptable”.

“It’s disappointing. If you’re a technician or engineer with SMRT, you are tasked to carry out routine tasks. If you don’t play your part, the whole system will suffer consequences. You may think that it’s a small role, but the consequences can be huge.”

He added: “When you’re involved in maintenance of the system, the company and public is entrusting you to keep the equipment in tip-top shape.”

On the team submitting records even though the maintenance works were not done, Mr Lim said: “It’s one thing to have a lapse in maintenance, but another thing to falsify records altogether.”

He hopes that more robust actions will be taken, “otherwise you won’t send signals that such actions are totally unacceptable”.

Mr Yee Chia Hsing, MP of Chua Chu Kang GRC, called it “irresponsible” behaviour by a small group of employees, calling them the “weakest link” in the organisation.

He hopes that this was an isolated incident, because most of the employees “have been working their guts out” to ensure the system was restored after the incident this month. “I am sure that the bulk of the employees are conscientious and have been working hard to ensure that our commuters have a smooth train journey,” Mr Yee said.

Another committee member Zaqy Mohamad, also MP for Chua Chu Kang GRC, said that the results of the probe are quite shocking, given that there was a lot of emphasis on maintenance issues for trains in recent years.

What struck him was the culpability of the employees. “It doesn’t reflect the entire population, but it’s unfortunate that a few bad hats will spoil the image of the hardworking men and women who are trying to solve the engineering issue,” Mr Zaqy said.

“Another thing is governance and control. How well are maintenance regimes being checked and managed? We need tighter governance over maintenance,” he added.

Assistant Professor Terence Fan, transport analyst from the Singapore Management University, was taken aback by the revelation.

“I’m very shocked. If they have falsified records for this pump maintenance system, what else could they have been falsifying?” he asked.

There should have been cross-checking systems, he said, where another team checks on the work done by the maintenance team, without them knowing.

“I think SMRT needs to make sure it upholds its integrity in serving the public, and the results of the probe hark back to what its CEO had said about the deep-seated cultural issues in the organisation,” he added.

Mr Cedric Foo, ex-chairperson of the Transport Government Parliamentary Committee, asked that people do not “paint every employee with the same brush”.

The negligence may have been the result of a small group of people. By and large, many workers in the organisation do carry out their responsibilities, he said.

In 2011, SMRT had to set up a Committee of Inquiry after two major outages affected 127,000 commuters at 11 MRT stations on the North-South Line. The committee discovered shortcomings in SMRT’s maintenance regime and checks, and later, the company’s CEO Saw Phaik Hwa resigned.