The New York Times: May 6, 2007
At a memorial service in Queens Village for Marvin Franklin, 55, a subway maintenance worker who was killed by a G train in Brooklyn last Sunday, many of his fellow transit employees wore their safety vests.
In a sea of church ladies with wide white hats and deacons in dark suits sat 120 broad-shouldered men wearing orange-and-yellow reflective vests, transit workers came to bid goodbye to one of their own.
And no one at the funeral of Marvin Franklin, who was killed one week ago, carried the wounds of that day more visibly than Jeff Hill, a lithe young worker who stood alongside Mr. Franklin as the G train bore down.
Mr. Hill came to the funeral in a neck brace, his forearm scratched raw. After a round of song and prayer, he took the pulpit.
He described Mr. Franklin as a mentor who offered pointers on life and art. Then, as if reliving the moment, he described walking across the tracks that night. His words tumbled out one upon the other.
“I saw a light behind Marvin,” Mr. Hill said. “I saw a light above his head. I couldn’t even yell.” Mr. Hill’s chest heaved, he shook his head and continued: “Marvin was squeezed behind me, I saw Marvin squeezed and mushed between the train and the platform.”
Tears began to roll down Mr. Hill’s face. Sobs and supportive shouts of “Amen!” rose in response from the church pews.
“Mrs. Franklin” — Mr. Hill looked at Mr. Franklin’s widow, Tenley, who sat in the front pew — “I love you with all my heart. And I love Marvin, too.”
Everyone in the church rose to their feet and clapped, and transit workers held clenched fists aloft.
Mr. Williams, a 55-year-old husband and father, died last Sunday night in the subway tunnels where he had labored for two decades.
Yesterday his coffin sat inside New Covenant Church of Christ in Queens Village, cloaked in carnations and lilies and within touching distance of his wife, three children, five sisters and four brothers.
In a post-modern city that often seems removed from its smokestack past, these men and women work at an industrial-age craft with all the dangers that implies. Since 1946, at least 238 subway workers have been killed on the job; nine in the last seven years. Mr. Franklin was the second track worker killed in less than a week.
Old hands at the funeral described feeling the vibration of the tracks, listening to the rumble and trying to determine from which direction a many-ton subway train is approaching.
Few maintain the illusion of fearlessness. “It’s like you’re walking in a bad neighborhood — you never, ever relax,” said James Tuck, a 59-year-old track worker.
Mr. Franklin was killed in the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station in Brooklyn as he and Mr. Hill were carrying a dolly across the G track toward the A and C lines track, which was undergoing work. Mr. Hill said they had followed safety precautions. “It was regular practice what we were doing,” he said. “Don’t let the media tell you otherwise.”
The New York City Transit Authority suspended track maintenance projects for a few days last week. The authority and the unions are preparing new safety measures and training.
Roger Toussaint, the president of Transport Workers Union Local 100, escorted Mr. Hill to the church in Queens.
“I wish I could say no more sad and horrible thing will happen,” Mr. Toussaint said. “It is extremely, extremely difficult and dangerous work.”
Mr. Franklin was a son of the South Jamaica projects and passed his adult life laboring in subway tunnels. But art sustained him. He earned a degree in illustrative arts from the Fashion Institute of Technology and carried a sketch pad to work, drawing his fellow workers and passengers and handing out the sketches as he left. (Mr. Franklin’s self-portrait adorned the Order of Service for his funeral).
Bob Ritter, a jowly 57-year-old trackman with white hair pulled back in a ponytail, carefully unfolded a sketch that Mr. Franklin had done of him. He patted his belly. “The sketch was too good,” he said. “Reality hurts, you know?”
Mr. Franklin often studied at the Art Students League. He wanted to retire and open an art gallery, and give the proceeds to the homeless.
Midway through the service, Michael Williams, a muscular track worker in a pinstriped suit, rose and walked to the front of the church. “I’m Mikey, because that’s the name Marvin gave me,” Mr. Williams said. “I called him Marvelous, because he was.”
Mikey and Marvelous lived a half-dozen blocks apart in Queens and drove to work together. Mr. Williams described his bearded friend with a booming laugh, who at holiday parties “danced with everyone — all the women, anyway.” (Mr. Franklin was married once before, and his former wife, who was the minister, noted that it was a measure of the man that she could deliver the eulogy yesterday while his widow listened.)
“Whenever I would worry about money, Marvin would say: ‘It’s going to be all right, Mikey.’ ”
Mr. Williams was there that night his friend died. He heard him cry out twice — “Man under!” Mr. Williams found his friend’s boot and, farther down the track, his body.
Mr. Williams fought to hold his composure, and did not lose it.
“Marvin had a gift,” Mr. Williams said. “So I want to thank you, Marvelous, for enriching my life.”
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Looking Back at 6 Decades of Subway Worker Deaths
The New York Times: May 5, 2007
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
One tripped and fell on the third rail. One was walking along an elevated track when a board gave way and he fell to his death. One, walking on the tracks without carrying a light, was run over by a train.
Roger Toussaint, left, the union president, at a wake for Marvin Franklin, a subway worker who was killed.
Since 1946, at least 238 New York City subway workers have been killed on the job, according to a tabulation of the fatal accidents provided yesterday by New York City Transit. As dangerous as the work is today, the hazards appear to have been even greater in the 1940s and ’50s. From 1946 through 1959, 120 died. In 1948 alone, 17 men were killed.
Since 2000, nine have been killed, according to the tally. Those killed since 1946 include track workers, train operators, conductors, token booth clerks and electrical workers.
The agency did not explain why the tally it released began in 1946, decades after the subway system’s beginning.
The most recent deaths came last month, when two track workers, Daniel Boggs and Marvin Franklin, were struck by trains in separate accidents, dying within five days of each other. Mr. Boggs was buried on Monday, and a wake for Mr. Franklin was held yesterday.
Mr. Franklin’s death last Sunday prompted transit officials to call a halt to all work on the tracks and tunnels, which was lifted yesterday. Officials also began a wide-ranging safety assessment, which included an analysis of past fatalities.
The review provided yesterday gives only a few terse words or sentences about each accident, but it makes for a chilling litany of death and sacrifice in the tunnels, elevated tracks, railyards and workshops of the New York City subway.
The descriptions of the deaths throughout the years are not always precise, but by far the most common cause was being struck by a train, accounting for about 150 of the fatal accidents. About two dozen workers were electrocuted on the third rail. Close to 20 workers died in falls, some of them from elevated tracks. Eleven workers died in train crashes or collisions. Three were shot to death in robberies.
The survey shows that death on the tracks can be both grimly routine and subtly varied. Many workers were killed as they squeezed into a trackside niche or the narrow space between tracks to get out of the way of an oncoming train — “clearing up,” in the parlance of track workers. In some cases, they were stuck by another train passing on an adjacent track. And sometimes they simply did not get far enough out of the way, and were clipped, struck or dragged.
That is what happened to Peter McNamara on Nov. 2, 1948. He cleared up, the report says, but because he was “standing over equipment,” he was unable to move his body completely out of the train’s path, and was struck and killed.
The high-voltage third rail has been another frequent cause of death.
It is mentioned in the first accident included in the transit agency’s report. On July 9, 1946, it says, J. A. Kilgus, a car inspector, tripped on debris in the 207th Street railyard and fell onto the third rail.
One of the deaths in the report carries an echo of the accident that killed Mr. Boggs, who had been setting out warning lamps near Columbus Circle and was crossing the tracks when he was struck. On Oct. 27, 1949, Lemar Clark was hit by a train at Franklin Avenue in Brooklyn after placing warning lamps on another track.
Some deaths are grimly urban. A token booth clerk, Charles Vincent, was held up at gunpoint and shot at a Manhattan subway station on Feb. 10, 1959.
Others come like a bolt from the blue. On Sept. 11, 1958, Harry Gillen was walking under an elevated structure in Queens when an object fell on his head, killing him.
Some accidents caused multiple deaths. On Oct. 22, 1968, George Herring and Marvin Kemp, signal maintainers, were “deeply engrossed in work,” failed to set up warning lights and were hit by a train, the report says.
The list does not appear to be exhaustive, as it does not include the Nov. 26, 1995, attack on Harry P. Kaufman, a token booth clerk who was burned when robbers squirted flammable liquid into the booth and set it on fire. He died the next month.
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After Deaths, Transit Chief Reaches Out to the Union
The New York Times: May 3, 2007
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
The new head of New York City Transit sent an emotional letter addressed to 47,000 subway and bus workers yesterday, calling for a greater emphasis on safety in the wake of two recent track worker deaths and urging a new, more trusting era of labor-management relations.
Referring to his 20-year career in the United States Army, the transit president, Howard H. Roberts Jr., recalled the time he served as a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne Division, where staying alive was a matter of following safety rules.
“The only difference between being a paratrooper and working many jobs at NYC Transit is that jumping out of planes was a lot safer,” Mr. Roberts said in the letter.
Mr. Roberts, who started the job in mid-April, said he was taking the deaths last month of the two track workers, Daniel Boggs and Marvin Franklin, in accidents five days apart, “personally” and said that he felt “responsible for everything that happens or does not happen at NYC Transit.”
The letter was distributed to thousands of employees by e-mail and also posted at work sites in the transit system.
After the second death, last Sunday, Mr. Roberts ordered an immediate stop to all work on tracks and tunnels so employees could receive additional training on safety procedures.
In the aftermath of the track workers’ deaths, Mr. Roberts has worked closely with Roger Toussaint, the president of Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union. They both attended the funeral of Mr. Boggs, who was killed April 24, and paid a hospital visit to another worker, Jeff Hill, who was injured in the second accident, in which Mr. Franklin was killed.
Their apparently warm relationship reflects a change from recent years, before and after the subway and bus strike of December 2005, which were marked by frequent antagonism between the union and officials at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
In the letter, Mr. Roberts said management and labor “share the same goals,” including safety.
“I am going to require that the chain of command tries to work as cooperatively with labor in every aspect of our business as Roger Toussaint and I have worked together through these two terrible tragedies,” he wrote. He said that he was including a union member on the panel that is investigating Mr. Franklin’s death, and that union members would be assigned to future investigations of accidents as well.
Paul J. Fleuranges, a spokesman for New York City Transit, said that Mr. Roberts had not yet set a date when work on the tracks and tunnels would resume.
After last Sunday’s accident, Mr. Toussaint spoke in positive terms about Mr. Roberts’s actions in response to the workers’ deaths. “This is certainly a harsh introduction,” Mr. Toussaint said, “to the harsh realities of life in Transit.”
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SAFETY SLIP-UPS IN RAIL HORRORS
New York Post: May 6, 2007
By GINGER ADAMS OTIS
KILLED: Track workers Marvin Franklin (above), who was struck crossing these rails, and Daniel Boggs (below).
-- The subway accident that claimed the life of Daniel Boggs occurred five days and a borough away from the tragedy that killed Marvin Franklin. But the two track workers shared a fate defined by simple mistakes in dark and unforgiving spaces.
Both gruesome subway accidents might have been avoided had NYC Transit followed the same stringent safety regulations enforced by the MTA on its commuter lines, union members charged last week.
During tours of both accident sites given exclusively to The Post last week, grim reminders still stained the steel rails.
For Franklin, 55, who was struck last Sunday by a G train at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station in Brooklyn, death came disguised as a shortcut.
Transit officials are still investigating, but transit union officials say Franklin was killed hauling a dolly across tracks at the behest of his supervisor - a violation of NYC Transit safety rules.
Franklin, of St. Albans, Queens, was laid to rest yesterday after a funeral in Queens Village.
Although Franklin and his partner, Jeff Hill, 41, could have used the nearby stairs leading to the mezzanine, they were ordered along the quickest route, across the mouth of the tunnel.
Without proper flagging, there was no way the conductor could have known two men were just around the bend.
And with the noise from two large generators and other train traffic, there was no way Franklin and Hill could have known the train was coming.
Hill threw himself to the wall and clung to a catwalk. He was "bounced around like a pinball," a union official said. He suffered broken ribs.
A swath of bloodstained sand in the track trough still stretches about the length Franklin was dragged.
To Franklin's left was an 8-foot construction wall that limited his access to the safe spaces between the tunnel columns. To his right was the catwalk just out of reach. Above him were two burned-out bulbs.
Boggs, 42, was killed on April 24 at the Columbus Circle station. Patches of sand marked the inner corners of the station's middle track, where a No. 3 knocked him off his feet, dragged him and left him wedged against the lance-like "shoe" that carries 600 volts.
His rookie partner screamed Boggs' name. Just moments earlier, he had been listening to Boggs talk about the home run his son had hit that weekend.
With two local trains pulling in, Boggs didn't hear the express barreling down a track that 20 minutes earlier was declared safe for workers.
"We don't know why the train was there - it shouldn't have been," said track worker Shannon Poland, who arrived moments after the accident.
Not 20 feet away, inside the mouth of the tunnel, a lone blue light glowed.
"That light is supposed to indicate there's an alarm box, where you can pull a lever and immediately cut the power to the third rail," Poland said.
The night Boggs was hit, workers ran to the box. It didn't work. They ran to a second box. It didn't work. Finally, they ran to a station booth.
Another track worker said Boggs' partner was traumatized. "He's like in a fog, walking around," the worker said. "It was terrible."
