Equipment Failure: Washington Metro Shutdown for Emergency Maintenance

How much does an equipment failure cost? Washington Metro, after having a repeat failure on power distribution jumpers (2 in the past year, with one fatality), decided to shutdown the entire Metro system for a full day. Lost revenue (counting only lost fares) is estimated to be $2 million. This doesn’t count inspectors’ pay, cable replacements, etc.
Effective root cause analysis is critical to maintaining equipment reliability. It’s not good enough to have equipment fail, and then just replace the equipment. Your RCA must look at other possible human performance issues:

– Maintenance procedures
– Inspection periodicity
– Inspection requirements and procedures
– Inspector training
– Reasons for having a repeat of a supposedly corrected failure
– Generic cause analysis

These are the types of things that must go into an equipment failure analysis. Repeat failures cost money, convenience, and possibly lives.