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Quotes: 'Why the hell didn't they do it sooner?" - Gerry Gringmann, LIRR Commuters Council
The Long Island Rail Road knew for more than three decades that the gap between trains and platforms posed a serious threat to passengers, injuring hundreds of riders in terrifying falls.
The railroad knew that Patricia Freeman fell into a gap at the Garden City station in July 2004, fracturing a hand, three ribs and a bone in her spine.
It knew that Melissa Kalbacher slipped into a gap at the Hunters Point station in Queens in January 1998, tearing the skin off her right shin.
It knew that Mark Daniels plunged into a gap at Hicksville in 1985, crushing his pelvis.
Since 1995, the LIRR has logged more than 800 gap incidents at stations from Penn to Bridgehampton, according to records obtained and analyzed by Newsday. The falls have involved toddlers and senior citizens, regular commuters and occasional riders, the disabled and the able-bodied. During that period, gap falls have comprised an increasing percentage of rider accidents.
And yesterday, LIRR officials revealed that an estimated 38 percent of its platforms have problem gaps.
Yet until recently the railroad's efforts to prevent falls amounted to little more than "Watch the Gap" warnings posted inside train cars, at a few stations and in safety brochures.
The long history of gap falls took a deadly turn in August, when Natalie Smead, 18, a Minnesota teenager whose blood-alcohol level was nearly three times the legal limit for driving, fell through a gap at the Woodside station and crawled into the path of an oncoming train. In ensuing days, Newsday measured and reported the size of gaps across the system, including one in Syosset that was found to be 15 inches wide.
Only then did the railroad launch its first systematic attempt to fix the gap problem. That effort, which they announced two months later, used relatively simple methods - such as tacking wooden boards onto platform edges - that top LIRR officials admit they could have employed years ago.
"This was nothing new," state Sen. Dean Skelos (R-Rockville Centre), the Senate's deputy majority leader, said of the gaps. "Injuries were occurring - nothing fatal until now, but when you have continuous injuries...