Shouldn’t our train systems be on high alert too?

As the Department of Homeland Security ramps up airport security in response to the latest Al Qaeda threat involving the smuggling of undetectable bombs onto US airliners, the smoke has literally just cleared in DC’s L’Enfant Plaza metro station.

This week’s incident in L’Enfant Plaza, during which passengers were stranded for nearly an hour in a stuck yellow-line train while it and the station filled with smoke, claimed the life of one commuter and sent dozens more to local hospitals for smoke inhalation.  While the National Transportation Safety Board has yet to give formal findings on the sequence of events in the metro tunnel, and apparently will not do so for several months, it appears for now that the smoke was caused by electrical “arcing”, which occurs when electricity from the third rail contacts another substance that conducts electricity. The precise cause of the arcing, however, remains unknown.

The White House (for whatever Team Obama’s assessment of these things is worth) has stated that this does not appear to have been an act of terrorism.

Even if this was not some sort of “dry run”, it’s not unreasonable to assume that those who wish to cause a mass-casualty event inside the United States have taken note of the vulnerabilities in our rail transit system and the seemingly inadequate response capabilities that this L’Enfant Plaza incident has exposed – in one of the highest-value target cities in America, no less.

Given 1) heightened concern over terrorist attacks in the United States in response to events in Paris earlier this month; 2) the extent to which terrorists have been successful in targeting urban rail systems in other countries in recent years, and 3) previous terrorist interest in attacking US train systems, one would hope that the L’Enfant Plaza debacle would prompt authorities to adopt the same kind of heightened alert posture for our commuter train systems that we are now, rightfully, seeing at our airports.

Perhaps there are more train system security upgrades happening behind the scenes than the public has been made aware of, but there is reason to doubt that the L’Enfant Plaza incident, or rail security generally, are receiving the needed attention. As Michelle Malkin recently pointed out in a must-read piece, much dismantling of our rail security capabilities has happened at the hands of the Obama administration, though it would appear from Malkin’s report that the Transportation Security Administration was unresponsive to U.S. GAO rail security recommendations going back to 2005.

JFK once remarked (albeit in a much different context) that the time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining. We’ve seen the chaos and loss of life that an apparently non-intentional electrical incident can create in our rail transit system. We urgently need to identify and close security and emergency response gaps on the rail side of our transportation infrastructure before jihadists bring the storm.