CAMBRIDGE, MASS. (WHDH) - The city of Cambridge has released 911 calls made from the MBTA’s Harvard station moments after a piece of electrical equipment fell on a woman standing on a platform last month.
The incident happened on May 1. Now, call recordings show callers said they could not find any T employees nearby to help in the immediate aftermath.
“Hi there,” a caller says in one recording. “I didn’t know where to call. It’s in the Harvard MBTA station — on the lower platform — on the inbound platform. There’s equipment that fell and hit a person. So, there’s a lot of us who saw it. Somebody needs to get here. I don’t know the MBTA 911 number, but there’s nobody here.”
The city of Cambridge only agreed to release recordings after altering the voices of the callers.
In calls, a good Samaritan can be heard telling a dispatcher they could not find any T employees nearby. Another caller told Cambridge police the same thing when they dialed 911.
“There’s not an ambassador from the MBTA here but just want to officially report this to all official channels that this just happened,” the caller said. “I’m assisting a person who was hit by the equipment and it could have been so much worse.”
A copy of the dispatch log from the MBTA’s Operations Control Center shows, at 4:52 p.m., Cambridge police dispatch notified the T of the incident.
Right after that, the report says an officer was “making his way” there. The report does not say where the officer was coming from.
Eight minutes later, the officer was on scene and reported “an electrical box broke off the straps on a south bound pillar and struck a woman.”
The woman has since been identified as 28-year-old Joycelyn Johnson, a graduate student at Harvard.
“Suddenly, something came crashing down and there was a resounding thud that I felt on my body,” she told reporters after the incident. “I staggered a bit and I didn’t fall, but I could feel a numbing sensation coursing throughout my arm, my shoulder and back.”
Two months before the equipment box fell, another passenger who got off a train at Harvard was just inches away from being struck by a falling ceiling tile.
The T released video of the moment the ceiling tile fell on March 1.
In one angle, a T employee can be seen showing up on the platform five minutes after the tile fell and looking up at the ceiling.
7NEWS asked the T about its policies regarding employees being present at busy stations like Harvard.
“(S)tations such as Harvard are always staffed with any combination of the following: MBTA personnel, Transit Ambassadors and/or Transit Police,” the T said in response.
While that might be the T’s policy, transportation safety expert Dr. Carl Berkowitz says it’s not enough.
“What good is having people present at the station if they’re not circulating?” Berkowitz said. “How can they help anybody if nobody knows who they are? And it’s not the job of the customer to find them. It’s the job of the personnel management, customer service people to find the customer, not the other way around.”
The woman who was hit by the falling box in May has said she intends to sue the MBTA because of what happened to her.
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