January 13, 1982

Roger Shuy describes the eerie experience of walking home through the snowstorm from an almost deserted Washington National Airport on the day of the 1982 Air Florida crash. His trip home was also impeded by a shutdown on the Metro:

Routinely, I went outside to take a taxi home. No taxis. So I crossed the street to board the Metro. After sitting on it for some thirty minutes, I learned that there had been a fire on the Metro on some other line, causing the entire system to shut down.

Actually, it wasn't a fire on some other line; it was a derailment and collision that killed three people near the Federal Triangle station, which was on the same line as National Airport, the Blue Line (the section through downtown DC is shared by the Orange Line as well). Since the collision happened more or less simultaneously with the plane crash, it was hard to get emergency services to the subway crash site. It remains the worst fatal accident in the history of the DC subway system, though there was an accident in 2004 at Woodley Park-Zoo that could have been far worse had the train been full.