Mystery Worker Removed Barrier at Tenleytown

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So much for taking some time off for the holidays.

On Nov. 16, several Metro riders were greeted with a scary sight at Tenleytown.

As they climbed what appeared to be a run of the mill broken escalator, they arrived near the top to see a gaping hole where some steps were missing because the escalator was under repair.

You can read about the incident here, but the really amazing facts emerged today during a Metro meeting.

Seems someone "appearing" to be a Metro worker removed one of the accordion barriers that seem to adorn every other escalator in the system from in front of the Tenleytown unit.

The reason the word "appearing" was used is that despite the culprit having a radio and a key to turn off and on escalators, the film from the video surveillance camera was "grainy," so they can't be 99 percent sure it really was a Metro worker.

Worse still, they have no way of tracking down who it was, and more than a month later, they still don't seem to know who did this and why

So what are the brainiacs at Metro going to do to solve the problem?

They're now looking into some way to make the barriers clamp down to the escalator units so they're not as easy to remove.

They're also going to upgrade the video surveillance system.

Those will no doubt cost money, probably not a lot, but still.

Sounds just like the screaming bus solution: find a technological or physical "solution" to try to fix a culture that is all too often irresponsible and unsafe.

Instead, Metro, why don't you have some kind of system in place, so that you know who tinkers with your escalators and who might have been "on duty" that day?

How about finding out who did this, and firing them for endangering the lives of riders because that's exactly what they did.

In the end, this dangerous situation was remedied by, you guessed it, a rider who was able to find a cone (not hard) and put it in front of the broken escalator to prevent more people from climbing up.

What did that rider get for his or her initiative?

A fare increase and a cracked rail.

Photo: afagen