"a situation"

I ride the DC Metro to work - the Green Line. This morning they were making a repeated announcement (6:55 a.m. at Greenbelt). "Red Line service has been disrupted due to a situation outside the Fort Totten Station. There are no trains running between Rhode Island Avenue and Silver Spring. Shuttle buses have been provided" and they named all the stations "but customers should add an hour to their commute time."

Two things struck me about that. First, that about how much longer it will take to get to Silver Spring today. Yes, you need to know that, but if I had been going there, finding out as I stand on the platform at Greenbelt wouldn't really help me: I wouldn't have left an hour earlier. Of course, this is all they can do. I mean, I imagine the commuter news and radio were warning people of major delays on the Red Line, but not everyone listens to those - and yet, what's the alternative? Metro doesn't exactly have the phone number of every one of the thousands that ride the Red Line... It was unavoidable, but (as it always does when I hear those announcements) it was also too late.

The other was the phrase "due to a situation". Situation. As the guy standing next to me observed, that's a helluvan understatement.

And yet, I can't imagine what else they could have said. "Due to the catastrophic accident outside Fort Totten last night"? "Until we can get the rails clear of the twisted wreckage of two trains"? Most of us already knew what had happened last night - well, yeterday, 5-ish, height of evening rush - at least in the broadest strokes. One train hit another, hard enough to ride up over the standing train. Fifty people people injured, sixty - seventy. Six dead - no, I heard nine... Metro's worst crash (though to put that in perspective, it's only the second with a fatality). Those who didn't - tourists (assuming any of them are up at 6:55) might not, or people who don't watch the news or look at their free Metro paper until they're on board - wouldn't have been in any way reassured to hear it. So I'm not sure what they could have said besides "situation"...

I'll add that there weren't noticeably fewer people there this morning. I had thought there might be. But I guess it'll take more than one such crash to keep people off the trains - more people die on the roads every year by a factor of four just in the District, but people keep on driving.