City defends 1-day retraining of driver between previous collision and fatal Westboro crash
Aissatou Diallo crashed another bus 1 month before fatal collision
After she crashed an articulated bus and injured five passengers in a preventable collision at St-Laurent station in December 2018, Aissatou Diallo received only one day of OC Transpo refresher training before being cleared to return to work, a coroner's inquest has heard.
One week later, Diallo crashed another bus, this time with fatal results, on the Westboro Transitway in January 2019.
While her remedial instructor found Diallo still had driving issues that needed improvement, a City of Ottawa training official said he believes OC Transpo properly trained Diallo to make sure she was safe to go back on the road.
"I mean, hindsight is 20/20," said Lindsay Toll, section manager of training and development for the city's transit services department.
"Yes, it was a tragic accident, absolutely, 100 per cent. Could we have added on more training? Of course we could have," Toll testified Monday.
"At that moment, we assessed the situation and assessed the issue. We allocated the proper training at the time and we felt that that was what we should go with."
Toll's testimony came on Day 9 of an ongoing inquest into the Westboro crash, when a packed double-decker driven by Diallo careened into a Transitway bus shelter at Westboro station.
Three people — Judy Booth, Bruce Thomlinson and Anja Van Beek — died, and many others were injured.
While the city accepted civil responsibility for the crash, Diallo was charged with 38 counts of dangerous driving causing death or bodily harm. She was acquitted of all charges in a judge-only trial in 2021.
'The booking is the booking'
On Monday, Toll offered new details about Diallo's training at OC Transpo. He also fielded the inquest's most probing accountability questions to date.
One of the lawyers leading the inquest, Alessandra Hollands, asked Toll whether he had concerns with Diallo going back to work on double-deckers and 60-foot articulated buses following her December collision. She was still on probation at the time, having been hired only a few months before.
Toll pointed to a practice scrutinized earlier in the inquest: booking drivers on schedules months in advance and based on seniority, with junior drivers like Diallo having much less choice in shifts.
"If you're asking if she should [have been] put on a 40-foot bus, that's just the way the booking works. Unfortunately, that's the way it happened in this case," Toll said.
Hundreds of other drivers are equipped to drive multiple bus types, he added, and Toll himself considered double-deckers "comparable" to other 40-foot buses.
"Would there be some anxiety? Could be. I wasn't there. I wouldn't know her. I don't know her anxiety level, but yeah, the booking is the booking," Toll said.
December 2018 collision
Documents shown at the inquest on Monday revealed more details about Diallo's prior collision in December 2018, when the articulated bus she was driving slammed into a parked bus at St-Laurent station.
"Operator error and failure to adjust speed to road conditions" were the root cause of that collision, according to an exhibit previously filed in the inquest.
The collision was considered serious by OC Transpo — there are only about one to two similar incidents per year, Toll said — and led to a three-week investigatory leave for Diallo.
According to one of the documents shown on Monday, one of the buses experienced major damage and one of the five injured passengers hit a seat face first. The driver of the other bus was thrown onto a mobile data terminal and hit his head on the steering wheel.
Diallo was told the incident was preventable and her driver safety rating was changed from zero to 44 per cent — a classification Toll said put Diallo "still in the low risk area."
A driver would probably have to be involved in multiple collisions before crossing into the medium- or high-risk category, Toll said.
"This was rated pretty high ... for a first collision," he said of Diallo.
One week before the Westboro crash
For her refresher training, Diallo was paired with a very experienced instructor who helped her retrace the route of her collision and coached her, according to Toll.
Toll was involved in the decision making around Diallo's retraining plan but not responsible for the later decision to clear her to return to work.
The refresher training lasted one day.
"I think she had adequate training for the day," Toll said in answer to a question about whether, given the seriousness of the December crash, Diallo could have benefited from more remedial training than two hours and 40 minutes over a single day.
According to her driving report — one week before the Westboro crash — Diallo scored a 2 in some categories including eye movement and lane changing and a 3 in most other categories. 3 refers to skills performed "properly/safely/smoothly" while 2 covers skills carried out "safely/properly" but requiring more improvement.
As Toll put it: "2s are for an average driver, 3s are you're doing really, really well."
Diallo received mostly positive comments, according to Toll, but the instructor also noted in the report that he "reminded [her] to use the accelerator a bit less."
Hollands asked Toll again if he thought Diallo's training should have been extended, given she still showed a need for improvement.
Toll agreed that it could have been, while adding later that he did not believe OC Transpo's operational needs at the time influenced the length of Diallo's re-training.
Diallo's initial training
The inquest has heard that OC Transpo drivers are trained to drive all bus types but that it wasn't until after the Westboro crash that mandatory training hours on each type were introduced.
OC Transpo also only started screening training candidates using a cognitive assessment tool after the Westboro crash. That succeeded in significantly paring down the list of applicants.
Back in 2018 when Diallo applied to become an OC Transpo bus operator, she would have undergone an interview and her driving record would have been checked to make sure she had zero demerit points, Toll said.
In one application document, Diallo indicated no experience driving a bus (and she didn't have to have any, according to Toll). She had 15 years of experience driving big SUVs and did 80 per cent of her driving in the past year with passengers.
In July 2018, she was trained on a doubledecker and scored mostly 2s (including on eye movement) and a 1 on lane changes, signage, eye lead time and mirror use, meaning she did those changes "improperly/unsafely."
She scored a 3 on eye movement, and several other categories, during winter training later in November.
OC Transpo has changed the marking scheme on its daily progress reports so that drivers either score as "satisfactory" or "unsatisfactory" in categories, Toll said in his second day of testimony on Tuesday.
"Either you're good to go, or you're not," he said.
Diallo has not operated an OC Transpo bus since January 11, 2019, according to an outline of her history.
Diallo herself remains the inquest's absent centre. She's on the witness list and was slated to testify last week but had not responded to a summons to attend as of April 10, according to the coroner's office.
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