Singapore’s Land Transport Authority (LTA) has confirmed that the private public transport operator SMRT is responsible for the July’s massive train breakdown that saw the North-South and East-West lines paralysed for over a day.
In the LTA’s press release, the SMRT maintenance team had actually detected water seepage in the railway track between Tanjong Pagar and Raffles Place during its routine patrol in mid-June 2015. However SMRT did not commence repair immediately and instead pushed the repair work to the end of July. As a result, the water seepage resulted in mineral deposits on the trackside equipment and insulator, resulting in a short circuit which triggered the safety mechanism that paralysed the entire train network on the July 7 incident.
Photo from CNA
However, SMRT is only fined S$5.4 million as a result of this lapse. The Temasek Holdings-owned duopoly private public transport operator racked in S$20.1 million in the three months from April to end June, while the SMRT CEO Desmond Kuek’s salary for the year alone is S$2.25 million.
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SMRT made S$20.1 million in a single quarter this year