BART Systemwide Outage: Board of directors grill executives on what went wrong in most recent incident

OAKLAND, Calif. (KGO) — BART executives were in the hot seat Thursday at the first board of directors meeting since the systemwide outage last week.

ABC7 News Investigative Reporter Melanie Woodrow was the only television reporter at the meeting.

General Manager Robert Powers is back from vacation but not saying much. Directors fired off their critique of this most recent systemwide outage. Now one person says it was her and her team’s job to make sure it didn’t happen.

“This event was my responsibility, and it was avoidable,” said Sylvia Lamb, BART assistant general manager of Infrastructure Delivery.

Lamb took the fall for Friday’s systemwide outage, the second systemwide outage in four months and third since 2019.

RELATED: Lots of questions swirl around latest BART service outage: Here’s what transit agency directors say

According to Lamb, the planned work involving BART network engineers and an unnamed 3rd party vendor moving a cable from an old switch to a new switch. Within a few minutes, the system lost connectivity to the network, creating what she’s calling a “network storm.”

“There is no one that feels worse about this than I, and my team do,” Lamb said.

Directors are demanding accountability, given prior systemwide network outages, regardless of the cause.

“I was surprised and concerned, because it happened again,” said Director Liz Ames.

“If we determine, as an agency, we need additional outside expertise, we will go get that outside expertise to just double down on making sure we do not put the Bay Area and BART in this position again,” said BART General Manager Robert Powers.

RELATED: Full BART service resumes after hours-long systemwide shutdown due to computer equipment problem

Powers also addressed the Aug. 29 Transbay Tube incident, when smoke filled a train car causing panic among passengers and halting service. BART executives said it was a blown insulator, but they’re still investigating the root cause.

The ABC7 News I-Team has been asking to speak with Powers since Friday, when he was out of state on a planned vacation. So, Woodrow brought her questions to the Board of Directors meeting.

MELANIE WOODROW: “Mr. Powers, I want to ask you, in light of the 2019 outage, the two systemwide outages within four months — including Friday’s and the Transbay Tube incident — what does accountability look like here? Should somebody be fired and who?”

DIRECTOR MARK FOLEY: “I appreciate you asking the question. I will ask that staff connect with you to answer that. I’m not looking to get into a back and forth here at the dais.”

WOODROW: “I hope that we can speak with you afterwards. Thank you so much.”

RELATED: BART director speaks on systemwide failure that impacted Bay Area morning commute

But we couldn’t. Instead we spoke with a BART spokesperson.

ALCIA TROST: “He asked me to make sure to come out and answer all your questions.”

WOODROW: “Why not talk to us? We’ve been trying to talk to him for some time now.”

TROST: “He is running a board meeting today. It’s also my responsibility to communicate to the reporters, so he asked me to make sure that I came out here and answered all your questions.”

WOODROW: “Should somebody be fired and who?”

TROST: “Well, that’s not for me to say.”

With further pressing…

“I can tell you, no one has been fired. I don’t believe there’s a plan to fire anyone,” Trost said.

Our efforts to get answers catch Director Janice Li’s attention.

“I am also deeply concerned that media has come to board meetings to make public comment to have questions answered,” Li said.

“We failed, simply put, we failed,” Foley said.

In the future, BART executives said they will communicate to the board and public that scheduled work is going to happen. They’ll also conduct the work on weekends instead of weekdays and contain the areas they’re working on.

It’s been one week since we first asked to speak with BART General Manager Robert Powers. Woodrow asked again Thursday, and she’ll ask again Friday. The ABC7 News I-Team will keep asking and keep viewers posted.

Regarding alerts after the shutdown, BART’s spokesperson says BART alerts went out at 5 a.m. BART notified 511 at 5 a.m. but says Nixle alerts did not go out right away, which is beyond BART’s control.