SBS Transit found 100% responsible for train incident that trapped passenger's head and neck between doors

CNA

13 hours ago

SINGAPORE: Transport company SBS Transit has been found 100 per cent responsible for an incident in June 2022 that resulted in a woman's head and neck being trapped between train doors at Punggol MRT station.
According to a judgment made available on Wednesday (Aug 20), SBS Transit was found to have breached its duty of care to the claimant, Ms Ng Lai Ping. The woman's age was not disclosed in court documents.
Ms Ng claimed to have tripped and fallen while trying to exit the train after the main lights were switched off, with no announcements played or given verbally by any train employee about the train being taken out of service.
SBS Transit argued that the incident was due to her own negligence, but the judge found that the transport firm had breached its duty of care to Ms Ng.
The remaining issues of liability and quantum are to proceed at trial, with a verdict at a later date.
THE CASE
At about 10.35am on Jun 27, 2022, Ms Ng boarded a train at Sengkang MRT station bound for Punggol. She intended to ride the train back from Punggol MRT station to Little India MRT station.
She sat in carriage five of the train, which had six carriages.
After the train arrived at Punggol MRT station, Ms Ng remained seated. She was not wearing headphones and she was not on her mobile phone.
She said the lights in the carriage were switched off suddenly and without any warning. Only the lights above the doors were on.
She heard beeping sounds coming from the direction of the train's doors, indicating that the doors were about to close.
Four passengers on her left suddenly got up and exited, followed by the fifth passenger on her far right.
Ms Ng felt the need to urgently exit the train, but had to bend over and pick up her bag from the floor.
As the train was poorly lit and the floor was reflective and grey, she said she tripped while trying to exit. Her face struck the gap between the platform and the train, and the platform doors and train doors closed on her head and neck.
An MRT employee and a passerby came to help her.
THE CLAIMANT'S STORY
According to Ms Ng, there was an announcement played informing passengers that service had resumed when the train was travelling from Sengkang MRT station to Punggol.
She said the train arrived at Punggol MRT Station. After the doors opened, the announcement of the resumption of service was played again in the train, she said.
Ms Ng said she did not hear any platform announcement that the train would be taken out of service. She said she heard only an announcement informing passengers not to board the train at the other platform.
She therefore remained seated in the carriage with five other passengers, waiting for the train to resume its journey.
She said she did not hear any loud shouting by staff members instructing passengers to disembark, or see any staff waving flashing red light batons outside or inside her carriage. No staff member entered her carriage to tell passengers to alight, said Ms Ng.
SBS TRANSIT'S VERSION OF EVENTS
According to SBS Transit, there was no announcement about a resumption of service while the train was travelling from Sengkang MRT station to Punggol.
The train Ms Ng was on was to be withdrawn. SBS Transit went into detail about its operational procedure for withdrawing trains, such as having an announcement played in the train in four languages informing passengers that the train will be taken out of service and asking passengers to alight at the next station.
The announcement about the train terminating at Punggol MRT station at the time would be played continuously at the platform of the station in four languages, at 12-second intervals.
Three staff members would board the train when it arrived at Punggol MRT station to ensure no passengers boarded the train, said SBS Transit.
This consisted of a customer service assistant each for carriages two and three and an assistant station manager for carriage six.
Only the two customer service assistants carried red light batons. The three employees would raise their voices to ask the remaining passengers to disembark.
Once there seemed to be no more passengers in the train, the customer service officer at carriage one would inform the operations control centre and request that the train's doors be closed so that no passengers could board.
The personnel at the operations control centre receiving this message would then activate the off-service command. Within a certain period, some of the lights would be switched off and the doors of the train would start to close.
After the doors closed, one of the customer service officers would walk through the entire length of the train to make sure no passengers remained before the train was taken out of service.
SBS Transit agreed that after the train arrived at Punggol MRT station that day, no staff member entered carriage five.
Ms Ng and five other passengers remained in the carriage, but all other passengers alighted the train.
While the staff member in carriage six did not carry a red light baton, he had asked the passengers in carriage five to exit the train and used his hands to signal to them to alight, said SBS Transit.
Three of the passengers noticed him after the lights dimmed, and four of them got up to disembark, followed by the fifth passenger. Ms Ng was the last to get up.
She ran, tripped and fell onto the floor, said SBS Transit.
SBS Transit produced videos from closed-circuit television cameras on the train and the platform of Punggol MRT station, but no audio was recorded.
A total of five staff members were present when the incident occurred. Two of them were in the train even before it reached Punggol MRT Station.
Another staff member, referred to as "Staff V", was in carriage five. When the train arrived at Punggol MRT Station, Staff V alighted from the train and stood on the platform looking at his phone.
None of the staff members was seen entering carriage five.
About 31 seconds after the train doors opened at Punggol MRT station, the lights in the train dimmed. Ms Ng agreed that there were about 12 seconds from when the lights started to dim and when she reached the train doors.
ARGUMENTS BY MS NG'S LAWYER
Ms Ng, who was represented by Mr Gregory Chong from Loo & Chong Law Corporation, argued that the incident was caused by SBS Transit's breach of statutory or common law duty of care.
Mr Chong argued that SBS Transit and or its employees were negligent in various things including:
failing to pay sufficient heed to the presence of Ms Ng and other passengers in the train before closing the doors
failing to provide any form of warning or announcement before switching off the lights in the train
failing to instruct an employee to enter the carriage and inform passengers to alight, and closing the train doors even while passengers were trying to exit.
Mr Chong also argued that SBS Transit had failed to play any audio message warning passengers that the train would be withdrawn when the train was travelling from Sengkang to Punggol MRT station, and that it had played the wrong audio message when the train was at Punggol MRT station.
Mr Chong said the damage suffered by Ms Ng was caused by SBS Transit's breach of duty.
SBS Transit was defended by Mr Anthony Wee from Titanium Law Chambers. Mr Wee said Ms Ng knew, or ought to have known, from the "out of service" announcement and "do not board" announcement that she should not remain in the train as it was no longer in service.
The dimming of the lights could not therefore come as a surprise to her, he said.
In any case, the interior carriages of the train were still lit by emergency lighting and other passengers had ample time to disembark safely, said Mr Wee.
He argued that the incident was caused by Ms Ng's own negligence. This included failing to pay attention to the announcements, exiting the train despite knowing that the doors were closing, and running towards the doors in a reckless manner.
SBS Transit said there was an adequate system in place to ensure that all passengers could safely embark, including having four staff members to ensure no one remained in the train.
NO OTHER INCIDENT LIKE THIS: SBS TRANSIT
SBS Transit asserted that "in all the years which it had operated the train at Punggol MRT station, there was no other incident like the one involving the claimant".
Mr Wee said the claim ought to fail as SBS Transit was not required to eliminate all risks and the measures it had taken at the station must have been sufficient, given that the risk of occurrence of a similar incident was "miniscule".
Mr See Lye Yun, a duty operations manager from SBS Transit whose duty was to ensure smooth operations of the North-East Line (NEL), gave statistics stating that there had been no similar incident at Punggol MRT station for 10 years before the incident, or to date.
Based on NEL ridership in 2022 at 177 million and 33.28 million for Punggol MRT station during peak hours, he derived an incident rate of 0.000000056 per cent for overall ridership for the NEL and 0.00000304 per cent for Punggol MRT station during peak hours.
JUDGE'S FINDINGS
District Judge Sim Mei Ling said she was not able to accept these incident rates. There were no documents produced to support the figures, and when Mr See took the stand, he denied supplying the documents for these figures, claiming he did not even know if they were correct.
However, Judge Sim accepted that the probability of a train door closing on a passenger during train withdrawal is low.
However, she said that even though the risk of similar harm was low, this alone was not sufficient to dispose of Ms Ng's claim.
Judge Sim noted that Mr See himself had given evidence that there was nothing published to inform passengers that the dimming of a train's lights meant that the train would be taken out of service.
She noted that Ms Ng's police report and evidence were consistent in that she had heard the announcement of resumption in service when the train was stationary at Punggol MRT station.
While SBS Transit had submitted that Ms Ng was not a credible witness based on how she maintained being trapped for 12 seconds even though the videos showed it was, at best, for one to two seconds, the judge found her evidence "nonetheless consistent on the whole".
Judge Sim said five other passengers in Ms Ng's carriage remained seated and started to leave only after the lights dimmed.
This suggested that the announcement that had been played was of resumption of service and not to notify passengers that the train was being taken out of service.
It was unlikely that all six passengers in carriage five missed hearing the out of service announcement in four languages, said the judge.
She drew an adverse inference against SBS Transit, because it did not call two staff members as witnesses, including Staff V who had been in carriage five.
Judge Sim found that SBS Transit had "more likely than not" played the announcements about the resumption of service instead of the out of service announcement.
She also found that SBS Transit had failed to play the do not board announcement at Ms Ng's platform when the train was at Punggol MRT station.
Therefore, she found that the transport company had breached its duty of care.
It had failed to provide any form of warning, notification and or announcement to passengers before switching off lights in the train, and also failed to exercise reasonable care, skill and prudence in operating the train with passengers inside.