1115.org

The world of spokesmanship is a strange, topsy-turvy world. Lying like a trooper is usually handsomely rewarded, but telling the truth before everyone is good and ready for it can be dangerous to your career. Even when there’s no dispute that you told the truth.

On Saturday Denise Tyrrell, spokeswoman for Metrolink, made a statement about the head-on train collision that killed 25 people on Friday:

Metrolink officials said Saturday that an engineer on their commuter train that collided head-on Friday with a freight train — killing at least 25 people and critically injuring dozens more — ignored a red-light signal.

Had the engineer obeyed the signal, the accident would not have occurred, said Metrolink spokeswoman Denise Tyrrell.

“We want to be honest in our appraisal,” she said Saturday at the scene of the crash, as rescue workers, now in recovery mode, used heavy machinery to untangle the twisted remains of the most damaged passenger car.

“Barring any information from the NTSB [National Transportation Safety Board], we believe our engineer failed to stop and that was the cause of the accident,” she said.

Being honest in her appraisal has now cost her her job:

Three days after a commuter train crash killed 25 people, the spokeswoman for rail agency Metrolink resigned after being criticized for public statements she made over the weekend indicating that the agency was responsible for the accident.

The move comes hours after Metrolink’s board held an emergency meeting, after which it tried to distance itself from spokeswoman Denise Tyrrell’s statements. In statement after the meeting, the board characterized Ms. Tyrrell’s early statements concerning the crash as “premature” and agreed to defer to the National Transportation Safety Board, going forward.

Metrolink Board Chair Ron Roberts said Sunday that the agency’s board hadn’t authorized, or known beforehand, that Ms. Tyrrell would tell the media so soon after the crash that the Metrolink engineer had failed to heed a red-warning signal, which led to the fiery head-on collision between the commuter train and a Union Pacific freight train in Los Angeles’s Chatsworth neighborhood. The swift admission of responsibility and apparent cause also angered NTSB officials who had arrived at the crash scene barely an hour before and had just begun their own investigation.

Ms. Tyrell says that she resigned after Mr. Roberts called her announcement “premature” and said that she “did not have authorization” to make the statement. Ms. Tyrell said that she had the authorization of David Solow, Metrolink’s chief executive, to take responsibility for the crash. Mr. Solow couldn’t be immediately reached for comment.

“The statement was and is accurate,” Ms. Tyrell said in an email. “It was the right thing to do regardless of how ticked off it made the NTSB.”

At a Sunday evening briefing, the NTSB confirmed the Metrolink engineer ran through a red signal, which led to the collision

I’m having a really hard time believing this. No one’s arguing that, as of Saturday, there was any doubt that the engineer had ignored the signal. Yet, somehow, announcing this to the public on Saturday was wrong, wrong, wrong? When there’s an accident like this, the responsible thing for all concerned is to, in effect, lie to the public by omission, maintaining that the cause is not yet known long after it actually is? Because only the NTSB is allowed to determine that a fact is a fact?

This is one of the stupidest things I’ve heard in a long time.