Cape Town – Transport Minister Fikile Mbalula admitted that the national rail disaster management centre called the "war room" was not meeting its objectives to address railway challenges, including safety.
Mbalula was speaking at the Devonvale Golf & Wine Estate in Stellenbosch yesterday where he revealed the State of Safety Report with the Railway Safety Regulator for the financial year that ended in March this year.
The report is published annually by the Railway Safety Regulator to provide an analysis of operational occurrences and security-related incidents in the rail environment.
It identified the main areas of concern for the regulator and operators to develop strategic interventions in these specific areas.
At least 990 operational occurrences took place in the 2018/2019 reporting year. This included derailment, collisions, level-crossing accidents and people struck by moving trains.
According to Mbalula, this was an 11% decrease compared to the last reporting year.
“These operational occurrences resulted in a total of 375 people losing their lives in the country’s rail network. While this indicated a 17% decline from the previous reporting period, the number remains alarmingly high.
"These numbers should not only be cause for alarm, but should spur us into action to reverse this trend,” he said.
Over the same period, 30 people were killed as a result of criminal conduct, a 36% increase from the previous year.
Mbalula said improving the state of affairs on railways remained government’s top priority.
“The war room is looking at all other aspects in relation to the deficiencies in passenger rail. It is not meeting its functioning to address all the challenges and will be improved.
"In terms of safety, we will bring new security arrangements in the trains. We will get people to be trained in terms of crowd control and combat reaction because of cable thieves and vandalists.
“We will request the SAPS to assist in terms of training. In terms of security in the trains, we have inherited the outsourcing arrangement, where security companies work under the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa’s (Prasa),” he said.
Prasa’s war room, launched by Mbalula in August and supported by a technical task team, was established to monitor Metrorail’s operations daily and ensure the implementation of turnaround strategies.
“This is to ensure we safeguard the passengers and goods in the railway. This plan is afoot in terms of addressing the security situation in the trains. Among other interventions we are looking at is to ensure proper fencing and the allocation of human settlement.”
Railway Safety Regulator chairperson Nomusa Qunta said: “We will focus on raising the bar to try and transform the railway. We need to look at all the avenues and activities done even by other countries and see how to improve the railway in South
Africa.”