The National Transportation Safety Board reported Tuesday that engineers falling asleep at the controls led to two recent New York City area commuter train crashes that killed one person and injured more than 200 others. The investigative agency has sharply criticized the Trump administration for scrapping a proposed regulation aimed at preventing such fatigue-related events.
NTSB investigators found that the engineers of both a New Jersey Transit train that crashed into the Hoboken terminal on September 29, 2016, and of a Long Island Rail Road train that crashed at the Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn on January 4, 2017, suffered from undiagnosed obstructive sleep apnea, a condition that disrupts sleep repeatedly through the night and has been shown to cause daytime drowsiness. The NTSB says the common sleep disorder is likely what caused the train operators to nod off as they pulled into the stations.