Entities question the security and communication of the Quito metro a few days after its inauguration

at the gates of the Quito subway start operations to the public, the Secretary of Security of the Municipality sent a letter to the mayor Santiago Guarderas warning of a series of breaches and technical inconsistencies that put on alert the security and communication of underground transport, whose inauguration is scheduled for December 21.

The document was sent on November 29 by the deputy secretary Patricio Núñez. It gives an account of a meeting held six days before in the crisis room of the metropolitan COE in which representatives of the ECU911, National Police, Ministry of the Interior and Secretary of Security participated in order to verify the progress of two work tables on security and communication of the first line of the Quito metro; Said roundtables were made up of the Quito Metro Public Company and the aforementioned entities.

The Quito Metro will begin operations on December 21, 2022

“The institutions evidenced the non-compliance by the Metro de Quito Metropolitan Public Company of various agreements, which would have been reached in matters of communication and security,” Núñez explains in the letter.

The metro would have five problems, according to the information provided to the mayor:

• The ECU911 indicated that, in communication issues, the structure and implementation to function underground and how the articulation with emergency entities has not been established. The entity ensures that there are inconsistencies about what the system will be, the management, the channel that will be used for all the institutions to communicate through the ECU911 system; how the communications integration console will work and the articulation regarding communication times. These concerns have not been answered by the Quito Metro company.
• In the operational part, the ECU911 also mentions that a drill was carried out, but that it was not carried out properly, protocols were not drawn up and there are no defined procedures to date. That the metro company only sent a document with general guidelines, without specific protocols in case of an emergency, and the response times, grades, or resolution capacity that the public company or its operator will have are not established. In addition, that these guidelines do not consider problems related to citizen security, forms of action in cases of the commission of crimes inside the facilities, or the form of response to what would happen in the case of a clinical or health event .

Quito Metro will begin operations in December; the ticket will be free until February 2023

• Due to the aforementioned problems, plus a lack of development of citizen security, risk and communication protocols, as well as the lack of determination of the extent to which Metro de Quito or its operator is responsible in emergencies, the General Directorate of ECU911 has indicated that the project requires the corresponding authorizations and validation to start operating on the scheduled date. If this does not occur, ECU911 anticipates that it will not guarantee or be responsible for any emergency that occurs within the transportation system.
• The Ministry of the Interior, for its part, expressed its concern about the trunked communications network that the Metro de Quito company plans to use in the project; the system is called Tetra. Óscar Gabela, delegate of the Ministry, assures that the system does not have authorization in Ecuador, so it could not be operated. The official clarifies that such a system is required to have connectivity with the emergency system; and that, if it does not comply with it, it could not be approved or used. Faced with this, public company servers have explained that the Tetra system is an administrative and non-operative network. Gabela points out that the guidelines are confusing, and that there are no clear guidelines regarding citizen security and crime.
• The representative of the Police, Diego Estrada, also emphasizes that the guidelines sent by the Metro de Quito company only contain procedures for action in cases of being run over, evacuation and fire, but no other process is contemplated for emergencies.

In the final paragraphs of the document, Núñez asked Mayor Guarderas to order the general manager of the Quito Metro, Efraín Bastidas, to take the necessary measures to solve the critical knots.

Similarly, the Secretary of Security requested to convene a meeting with the aforementioned entities.

After the letter was made public, the Municipality issued a statement in which it maintained that “all municipal institutions work in an articulated and coordinated manner to guarantee comprehensive security in the Quito metro.”

“I think that politically it is possible for them to start (operations) in December, but technically not”: the position of the oversight spokesperson in the face of a “reversal” in the process with the Quito Metro

The Fire Department and the metropolitan COE participate, through the public company Emseguridad and the Control Agents Corps, under the coordination of the Secretary of Security. And that the entities of the Central Government Integrated Security System intensify activities to implement all processes.

In addition, the Mayor’s Office affirms that the operating company Eommt and Metro de Quito are working on complementing the required protocols.

“As the mayor of Quito, Santiago Guarderas, has reiterated, the safety of citizens and the respective training for the use of the subway are —precisely— the issues that are part of the first phase of the opening process,” the council statement ends. . (YO)