The total number of those injured in last week’s MRT collision at Joo Koon has jumped to 38 after two more individuals sought treatment at Ng Teng Fong General Hospital, according to the Land Transport Authority.
SMRT’s Senior Vice President of Rail Operations on the North-South and East-West Lines (NSEWL), Alvin Kek revealed at a joint press conference with the LTA that SMRT has a compensation process in place for events like the MRT collision.
He added that commuters who had suffered injuries during the collision but did not seek medical assistance at the time may approach the duty officers at any MRT station for help.
Meanwhile, train services along four stations – between Joo Koon and Tuas West Link – of the Tuas West Extension has resumed today after it was closed down for further investigations following the collision.
Train services between Joo Koon and Gul Circle, however, are still not available as engineers conduct further checks for one month. Bus bridging services between these stations are available.
LTA and SMRT decided to isolate services on the Tuas West Extension last week after initial investigations revealed that the software glitch that caused the two trains to collide arose because one of the trains was “transiting between the old and new signalling systems.”
The LTA said then:
“Given this finding, LTA and SMRT have decided to isolate for up to one month the operations of the Tuas West Extension, which runs on the new signalling system, from the rest of the East-West Line, which runs on the old signalling system. This will enable our engineers to carry out further assurance checks together with Thales.”
In a separate statement, Transport Minister Khaw Boon Wan had said that he was “disturbed” that a “critical safety software could be disabled by a defective trackside device.”
Asserting that the link between the Tuas West Extension and the rest of the East-West Line should not be resumed until this issue has been fully addressed, the Minister added:
“I have told the team to keep separating the two sections of EWL, if need be until the entire EWL is ready to run on the new signalling system,” he said. “This way we avoid having trains transiting from one signalling system to another with its attendant safety risk.”
https://theindependent.sg.sg/total-number-of-injured-in-joo-koon-train-collision-rises-to-36/
https://theindependent.sg.sg/breaking-tuas-west-link-extension-isolated-for-one-month-as-more-details-of-train-collision-emerge/