OAKLAND, Calif. (KGO) — It’s been a week since ABC7 News first requested to interview BART General Manager Robert Powers following the third systemwide outage since 2019.
Still no response.
ABC7 News Investigative Reporter Melanie Woodrow attempted to ask Powers a question at Thursday’s BART Board of Directors meeting, but Powers didn’t answer.
“We had a really bad day last Friday. There’s no excuse for that,” said BART Director Edward Wright.
The frustration over BART’s latest systemwide outage is still palpable one week later.
RELATED: BART board of directors grill executives on what went wrong in most recent systemwide outage
At Thursday’s BART Board of Directors Meeting Woodrow attempted to ask General Manager Robert Powers a question, saying, “Mr. Powers, I want to ask you, in light of the 2019 outage, the two system-wide outages within four months — including Friday’s and the Transbay Tube incident — what does accountability look like here? Should somebody be fired and who?”
Powers didn’t answer. Instead, Woodrow talked with a BART spokesperson outside the meeting, who said no one has been fired and that BART can’t promise there won’t be another systemwide outage.
“At some point, the public loses trust in the people that are running BART, because it keeps happening,” Woodrow said to BART Spokesperson Alicia Trost.
“So when you ask about it’s gonna never happen again, there’s never been a commitment that something is never gonna happen again. That’s not possible,” Trost said.
“Is that a problem that you can’t make that promise?” Woodrow said.
RELATED: Lots of questions swirl around latest BART service outage: Here’s what transit agency directors say
“It’s the reality in running a public transit system. I do agree with you though that it’s really important that we be as reliable as possible to build that trust and accountability with our riders,” Trost said.
Wright says he doesn’t expect perfection.
“There’s no way to eliminate all risks in a system as large and complex as BART, but we have to do a better job managing those risks,” he said.
Which is something ABC7 News has wanted to ask General Manager Powers about. We’ve been requesting an interview with him since last week.
“I’ll definitely ask him, see if that’s something he’s open to doing and let you know,” Trost said.
We put in another request Friday, but so far, we haven’t heard back.
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