Whistleblower suit against rail operator rejected

A U.S. district judge has dismissed a former Ansaldo safety manager’s whistleblower suit, ruling that he did not show sufficient evidence that the local rail operator forced him to leave his job.

John McCaughey, who briefly served as Ansaldo Honolulu JV’s rail construction safety manager last summer, filed suit Oct. 1, alleging that the firm violated its contract with the city as well as state safety laws, and that it put its workers at risk of injury and death.

Records show that the U.S. District Court dismissed McCaughey’s case on March 24. Ansaldo Honolulu JV released a statement last week touting the dismissal. Ansaldo Honolulu Project Manager Enrico Fontana said the firm waited for the 30-day appeal period to expire and then focused on unveiling the island’s first driverless transit train before addressing the court’s McCaughey decision.

“Ansaldo considers the protection of Health, Safety, and Environment a fundamental corporate responsibility and a value underlying all of its activities,” the firm said in a statement last week. Its safety record, it said, “continues to be nearly spotless” with no fatalities or major injuries since the Honolulu rail project began.

Ansaldo has a $1.4 billion contract — the largest in state history — to deliver Honolulu rail’s driverless trains and signaling system.

According to McCaughey’s complaint, Ansaldo had hired him in May 2015 to exclusively oversee safety at its rail construction sites, but once he took the job the firm repeatedly gave him tasks unrelated to the project even though he was supposed to give rail’s safety his full attention.

McCaughey argued that responsibilities Ansaldo assigned him deviated from the safety job he was hired to do. Such a move, he said, could expose the company to legal action, and that he was forced to resign rather than comply with “these unethical activities.”

However, in a Jan. 1 decision denying McCaughey’s claims under the state’s Whistleblower Protection Act, U.S. District Judge Leslie Kobayashi concluded that “the allegations do not describe conditions that were so intolerable that a reasonable employee in his position would have felt compelled to resign.”

McCaughey had further claimed intentional infliction of emotional distress in having to perform duties that he said violated Ansaldo’s contract with the city, court records show. However, Kobayashi dismissed that claim because it did not “arise out of sexual harassment, assault or discrimination,” according to her January decision.

Kobayashi then gave McCaughey several weeks to amend his complaint, but he didn’t do so, court documents show.

McCaughey’s lawyer, Joseph Rosenbaum, declined to comment on Tuesday.

In separate correspondence last summer, Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation officials expressed concerns that Ansaldo was understaffing key job positions at a “critical juncture”of the project and that it was affecting progress.

“The absence of a number of key personnel at this time is unacceptable and inappropriate for a project of this magnitude,” Justin Garrod, HART’s deputy director of core systems, wrote in a July 15 letter to Ansaldo. The rail agency “is concerned that the continued vacancies of key personnel and other important positions are affecting the (rail project’s) progress,” he wrote.

In October, Ansaldo told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that those personnel issues were neither a major issue nor had they affected rail’s progress, and that most of the vacancies Garrod flagged had since been filled.

HART did not respond to questions about whether understaffing at Ansaldo has further affected the project in the past 10 months.