Six years after first approving new lighting as a safety measure, BART has yet to install the brighter LED lights engineers say will aid evacuation in the darkened subway tunnel running under San Francisco – leaving critics to wonder, how long does it take for BART to change a light bulb?
The BART Board of Directors approved the $12 million contract to upgrade the lighting in the tunnel after top officials said the new lighting was needed to bolster worker and passenger safety because the old, florescent fixtures were substandard and inadequate.
“We are going up considerably in the lighting,” BART’s project manager Javed Khan told the board when the contract for the lighting was approved in October 2018.
Khan pitched the plan then to install more than 2,100 new LED lights – twice as many fixtures as BART had in the tunnel. The project would bring ten times the light into the dark tunnel and bring the system up to current lighting code standards, BART officials told the board in a document. Khan said operators would see better with the upgrade, and passengers could evacuate faster and more safely in an emergency.
“For emergency egress you want to see the walkway…and find the exit,” Khan told the board.
Yet six years later, BART has yet to install the promised lights under San Francisco, as a recent ride in the darkened tunnels across the city confirmed. NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit went to BART’s inspector general Claudette Biemeret, seeking answers.
She said questions arose two years after approval of the $12 million tunnel lighting contract. That’s when an unidentified whistleblower complained to the inspector general’s office that BART was not getting its money’s worth on the lighting.
“It didn't meet the standards, the specifications that they set out,” Biemeret said, summarizing the complaint. An investigation led the then inspector general, Harriet Richardson, to conclude that the lights BART had purchased through the contractor were, in fact, not as bright as BART had originally specified and wouldn’t last as long as BART’s contract had required.
Yet BART favored them over lights that met those standards, the investigation found, because engineers considered them easier to install and would have lower projected maintenance costs. But soon after the inspector general flagged the specifications issue, BART fired the lighting contractor.
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The agency later settled with them for $2.4 million. BART kept the lights, while vowing to install all 2,182 fixtures itself.
Four years after it fired that contractor, however, officials recently acknowledged few if any new lights have been installed in the tunnel under San Francisco.
BART officials recently said that 70 percent of the originally purchased fixtures remain in storage and most of those that have been installed are now in the Berkeley Hills tunnel, not San Francisco. The seven-year warranty for those lights activates on the date of purchase. So many of the mothballed lights are running out time on their warranties, even when not being used.
“That’s wasteful,” Biemeret said in a recent interview. “You want to make sure that you're getting the best use out of your purchases.”
BART board member Debora Allen, a frequent critic of the agency’s management, has another word for it.
“Sometimes I do look at some of these things and say… that could be pretty absurd. I can see how the public would say that.”
BART officials wouldn’t answer specific questions about what happened with the lighting contract, saying only that they are reviewing the inspector general’s findings. In a statement, the agency said it “acknowledges the procurement process did not meet our high standards and we will work to do better in the future.”
In a recent audit committee meeting, BART’s deputy general manager Michael Jones suggested the audit process itself is to blame for the delay. But he then added: “there’s multiple reasons why that project wasn’t completed at that time and this in point in time.”
“I’d love to know all the other reasons,” Allen, a member of the audit committee, replied.
At the meeting, BART officials acknowledged that they’ve installed about a third of the supply they purchased for the San Francisco tunnel elsewhere. They said they still intend to use the remaining stock to upgrade the lights in San Francisco.
Allen asked about the status of the warranties for those uninstalled lights. “Is it gone? Are they passed the warranty?”
“I really don’t know,’’ responded BART official Sylvia Lamb.
It’s still not clear how long it will take for BART’s workers to install the lights BART purchased for San Francisco. Back when the project was first approved in 2018, BART predicted it would take a dedicated contractor two years, because crews can only perform the work during the four hours of overnight downtime in the system.
