Investigators untangling last week’s train wreck in Bridgeport, Conn., are warning that Monday’s commute could be a “carmageddon” of snarled road traffic after rail service in the region was shut down or severely limited.

Friday’s derailment forced suspension of rail service for 12 stations from South Norwalk, Conn., to New Haven along the heavily traveled New York-Boston corridor, the USA’s busiest Amtrak route. Amtrak service was suspended between New York and New Haven, and limited Amtrak service was available from New Haven to Boston.

National Transportation Safety Board investigators on Sunday were studying a piece of fractured track near the Metro-North Railroad derailment that injured 72 people. An eastbound train from New York City derailed and was hit by a westbound train.

Rail cars are being removed to locations where NTSB can study them, and about 2,000 feet of track must be repaired.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said track repairs could take several days.

“One person has characterized it as carmaggedon,” Blumenthal told USA TODAY on Sunday. “It will be at best chaotic, probably a great deal of turmoil on all the major traffic arteries going into New York.”

The suspension of rail service will mean thousands more vehicles on Interstate 95 and other major roads that often are clogged even under the best conditions. About 30,000 passengers a day use the Metro-North stations that have been closed and 125,000 overall use the New Haven line.

“It’s like throwing the proverbial monkey-wrench into the commute,” said John Townsend, a spokesman for auto club AAA in the Mid-Atlantic region. “It’s going to be disruptive — people will have to hop into their cars or seek alternate transportation. It’s not going to be a pretty picture.”

The shutdown in Bridgeport “is now a stranglehold on the normal commutes for literally tens of thousands of people who will have to find a way around that by bus or by car,” Blumenthal said.

Metro-North Railroad President Howard Permut said crews would work around the clock for multiple days to rebuild the damaged track, overhead wires and signals.

“This amounts to the wholesale reconstruction of a two-track electrified railroad,” Permut said. “Unfortunately, service disruptions on this section of the New Haven Line are expected to continue well into the coming week.”

In a briefing Saturday, Earl Weener, a member of the NTSB, said the investigation is in its early stages. But he said the fractured portion of track will be sent to Washington for analysis.

“It is of substantial interest to us,” Weener said. “It could have been caused by the accident or it could have been broken prior to the accident.”

Investigators are scrutinizing rail cars and maintenance records. They have identified and are examining the last train, also for Metro-North, that passed safely through the area before the accident.

“They’ve ruled out foul play. Now it’s whether there was human error or if there was structural weakness or other kind of failing,” Blumenthal said.

Once the rail cars are removed, Cranes athe tracks must be rebuilt.

“There is a lot of work still to be done,” Blumenthal said. “The best estimates are that rail service will resume sometime toward the end of this work week. There will be at least several days of very challenging commuting.”

Contributing: Associated Press

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

States should reduce the blood-alcohol level that qualifies as drunken driving to 0.05% to reduce fatal crashes, the National Transportation Safety Board recommended Tuesday.

The risk of a crash at 0.05% is about half as much as at 0.08%, the limit in all states, according to a safety board report released Tuesday.

“This is critical because impaired driving remains one of the biggest killers in the United States,” said Deborah Hersman, the NTSB chairman. “To make a bold difference will require bold action. But it can be done.”

But the board makes only recommendations to states and the federal government, and can’t make laws or regulations.

The Governors Highway Safety Association supports the current alcohol threshold, while commending the board for a comprehensive strategy to address drunken driving. The group favors ignition locks for first-time offenders.

“When the limit was .10, it was very difficult to get it lowered to .08,” said Jonathan Adkins, a spokesman for the governors group. “We don’t expect any state to go to .05.”

The advocacy group Mothers Against Drunk Driving welcomed the board’s recommendation, but rather than push for a lower blood-alcohol content level, the group is fighting to eliminate drunken-driving entirely. MADD is pushing for better technology to prevent convicted drunken drivers from operating a vehicle after drinking and to make law enforcement more visible.

“As a mother whose child was killed by a drunk driver, the most important thing to me is preventing as many families as possible from suffering similar tragedies,” said MADD National President Jan Withers. “MADD is focused on eliminating this completely preventable tragedy from our roadways.”

The American Beverage Institute, a trade group representing 8,000 restaurants, blasted the report for focusing on moderate drinkers rather than more dangerous drunken drivers.

The average woman reaches 0.05% blood-alcohol content after one drink, according to the institute. But more than 70% of drunken-driving fatalities are caused by drivers with at least 0.15%, representing six or seven drinks, it said.

“This recommendation is ludicrous,” said Sarah Longwell, the institute’s managing director. “Further restricting the moderate consumption of alcohol by responsible adults prior to driving does nothing to stop hard-core drunk drivers from getting behind the wheel.”

• Administratively suspending a driver’s license immediately when a driver is arrested for being drunk.

• Suggesting states require steering locks on vehicles driven by convicted drunken drivers that would test the driver’s breath before returning to the road. The group also recommended incentives through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to encourage states to adopt the locks.

• Creating special courts to handle drunken-driving cases.

• Documenting the last place drunken drivers had a drink before their crashes.

More than 100 countries set drunken-driving levels at 0.05%, leaving the U.S. as one of few developed countries with a higher level, according to board staffers.

The board’s recommendation follows an effort in the European Union, which set a goal of cutting alcohol-related fatalities in half by 2010 and succeeded. Europe is now trying to cut the crashes in half again over the next decade.

The NTSB meeting came on the 25th anniversary of a fiery crash in Carrollton, Ky., that killed 25 people and injured 34 others when a pickup driven by a drunken driver hit a school bus returning from a church trip to an amusement park.

In 1982, the safety board previously recommended that states reduce drunken-driving limit from 0.10% to 0.08%. Utah became the first state to lower its limit in 1983, but all states hadn’t followed suit until 2004.

In 1982, about half of all highway deaths involved alcohol-impaired driving and killed 21,113 people. The number of deaths has been cut in half since then, but about 10,000 deaths a year still represent about one-third of traffic fatalities. The numbers have held steady since 1995.

“We have made progress since that deadly night in Kentucky, but not nearly enough,” Hersman said.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

The Federal Aviation Administration said Saturday afternoon that normal operations of its system will resume by Sunday evening after Congress passed legislation that allowed the agency to end furloughs.

In a statement Saturday, the FAA said it has suspended all employee furloughs and that air traffic facilities “will begin to return to regular staffing levels over the next 24 hours.”

The House cleared legislation Friday that allows agency to shift $253 million from other accounts to end furloughs that began Sunday. The vote was 361-41. The Senate approved the measure Thursday night.

On Friday, Lawmakers said the furloughs could end immediately after President Obama signs the bill into law.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said President Obama would sign the bill, though he wasn’t sure when. “It will be good news for America’s traveling public if Congress spares them the unnecessary delays that we’ve seen,” he said.

About 40% of delays this week were a result of not enough controllers in towers, the FAA said, with 1,200 delays blamed on staffing on Monday, 1,025 on Tuesday and 863 on Wednesday.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Flight delays caused by the furloughs of air-traffic controllers are coming to an end.

The House cleared legislation Friday that allows the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to shift $253 million from other accounts to end furloughs that began Sunday. The vote was 361-41. The Senate approved it Thursday night.

The chairman of the transportation committee, Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Pa., supported the bill to “stop this needless pain on the American traveling public and the economy.”

Lawmakers said the furloughs could end immediately after President Obama signs the bill into law. But the FAA said it wasn’t clear how quickly the controller schedules could be changed to fully staff control towers.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said President Obama would sign the bill, though he wasn’t sure when. “It will be good news for America’s traveling public if Congress spares them the unnecessary delays that we’ve seen,” he said.

About 40% of delays this week were a result of not enough controllers in towers, the FAA said, with 1,200 delays blamed on staffing on Monday, 1,025 on Tuesday and 863 on Wednesday.

The number of delays, including those for weather, more than tripled from a year earlier, from 2,795 to 8,804 this week, according to the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the union representing furloughed workers.

Nobody liked the furloughs of about 1,500 controllers a day, which resulted from $85 billion in government-wide spending cuts that forced the FAA into needing to cut $637 million by Sept. 30.

The second-ranking Democrat in the House, Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, opposed the legislation by citing an editorial in Friday’s USA TODAY that urged Congress to find alternatives to the meat-axe approach of cutting federal spending.

“Flight delays are just the tip of the iceberg, visible above the waterline for most Americans, and as time goes on without a big balanced solution to replace the sequester, more of that iceberg will surface,” Hoyer said. “More Americans will be negatively affected.”

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and FAA Administrator Michael Huerta said they couldn’t avoid furloughs to shave about $220 million and the closure of towers at small airports to save $25 million, along with curbing training, travel and information-technology spending.

The White House signaled Wednesday it was prepared to fix just the FAA, which Carney called a “Band-Aid approach” to the lingering federal spending dispute between Republican lawmakers and the Democratic administration.

Airport executives voiced some disappointment that a grant program for runway repairs would be raided to end the furloughs. The legislation allows FAA to shift money to end furloughs from the Airport Improvement Program, which has an estimated $400 million in unused funding, which had been exempted from spending cuts.

David Edwards, chairman of Airports Council International — North America, acknowledged that continuing flight delays would have a devastating effect on the economy. But Edwards, who is CEO of Greenville-Spartanburg Airport District, said raiding the grant program is unprecedented and doesn’t take into account the safety and security improvements made with grants.

The bill doesn’t specify how FAA should spend the $253 million, and the fate of towers at small airports remains uncertain.

The FAA planned to close 149 towers staffed by contract workers on June 15, although local communities offered to pay to keep about 50 open. The towers are at airports with fewer than 150,000 landings and departures a year and 10,000 commercial landings and departures.

Rep. Richard Hudson, R-N.C., said the bill gives the agency the flexibility to keep the towers open.

“I would encourage the secretary to do that for the safety and for the economy of our local communities,” he said.

Spencer Dickerson, executive director of the U.S. Contract Tower Association, said his group will lobby for tower funding.

“We’re going to work with the FAA to work on a solution here that will keep these towers open, so they will provide the safety benefits that control towers provide the traveling public,” Dickerson said.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

WASHINGTON — The Transportation Security Administration is postponing letting passengers carry small knives back aboard airline flights.

After facing strong opposition to the policy change from flight attendants and its own air marshals, the agency said Monday it was delaying the policy change so that the airline industry, passenger advocates and law-enforcement experts could weigh in on what should be allowed on planes.

“This timing will enable TSA to incorporate the feedback about the changes to the Prohibited Items List and continue workforce training,” the TSA said in a statement.

The TSA had planned to let the knives, with blades up to 2.36 inches, on flights starting Thursday. It would have been the first time they would have been back on passenger planes since Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists armed with box cutters hijacked four jetliners.

TSA chief John Pistole had made the policy change March 5, saying that airport security screeners needed to concentrate on greater risks to air travel.

He also said the change would better match international policy and that other potential weapons, such as scissors and knitting needles, have been allowed on planes since 2005.

The Flight Attendants Union Coalition, which represents 90,000 flight attendants and lobbied against the policy change, welcomed the postponement. The group argued that if TSA wants to change the policy, the agency must go through a formal rulemaking process.

“In the wake of the terrorist bombing in Boston last week … now is not the time to weaken transportation security,” said Sara Nelson, international vice president of the Association of Flight Attendants. “Flight attendants are breathing a sigh of relief that the weapons that led to the deadliest attack on U.S. soil in our nation’s history will not be allowed in the aircraft cabin this week.”

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

WASHINGTON — The Federal Aviation Administration Friday approved Boeing’s design to fix the batteries on its 787 Dreamliner — clearing the way for getting the plane flying with passengers aboard again.

The FAA approved Boeing’s plan to retrofit planes with the fixes to its lithium-ion battery system, which means that U.S. airlines could begin flying the plane as soon as the changes are made on the planes that they own. The FAA will issue instructions for changing the batteries next week.

To assure proper installation of the new battery design, the FAA said, it will closely monitor modifications of the aircraft in the U.S. fleet. “Any return to service of the modified 787 will only take place after the FAA accepts the work,” the FAA said.

The announcement is a major step in ending three months of turmoil for the company after problems with the batteries aboard two of its flagship jetliners resulted in the grounding of the worldwide fleet of the planes in January.

“These changes to the 787 battery will ensure the safety of the aircraft and its passengers,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said.

In addition to retrofitting planes that were already delivered, Boeing will begin installing the changes on new planes.

Boeing said it expected deliveries of planes to airlines to resume in the weeks ahead. The company also expects to complete all planned 2013 deliveries by the end of the year.

“FAA approval clears the way for us and the airlines to begin the process of returning the 787 to flight with continued confidence in the safety and reliability of this game-changing new airplane,” said Jim McNerney, Boeing’s CEO.

Rep. Rick Larsen of Washington, the top Democrat on the House aviation subcommittee, welcomed the announcement to return the plane to service.

“Now boarding: the Dreamliner’s return to flight,” Larsen said.

Investigators haven’t yet found the cause of a battery fire in a plane parked in Boston on Jan. 7 or a smoldering battery that forced an emergency landing in Japan on Jan. 16.

The National Transportation Safety Board scheduled a hearing Tuesday and Wednesday to update the investigation.

But Boeing redesigned the battery to better prevent and contain any potential fire in the future. The new version has better insulation between the battery’s cells to prevent overheating, a steel shell to starve a fire of oxygen and a titanium tube to carry flammable electrolytes overboard.

“This is a comprehensive and permanent solution with multiple layers of protection,” said Ray Conner, CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes. “The ultimate layer of protection is the new enclosure, which will ensure that even if a battery fails, there is no impact to the airplane and no possibility of fire. We have the right solution in hand, and we are ready to go.”

The 787 is an innovative plane made largely from composites rather than metal. It’s designed to be lighter in weight and thus more fuel-efficient. But it requires substantial power to operate, and Boeing turned to lithium batteries, which aren’t used in other jetliners, to provide it.

After months of lab testing, Boeing flew a certification flight April 5 of a plane built for LOT Polish Airlines. The FAA reviewed the results of flight and lab tests before certifying the plane.

At a Senate hearing Thursday, FAA Administrator Michael Huerta was asked whether the agency relies too heavily on industry when certifying planes such as the 787. Huerta said FAA has relied for 50 years on sharing expertise between government and industry technical experts to ensure “the highest levels of safety.”

“The FAA always retains the ultimate responsibility to make the call and make the certification,” Huerta said. “It is a process that has served us well for 50 years and which will continue to serve us well in the future.”

The grounding of 49 planes worldwide forced airlines to cancel months of flights. Boeing, which has orders for more than 800 of the planes, also halted deliveries until the battery problem was resolved.

But as approval neared to carry passengers, airlines and passengers started looking forward to flights.

United, which has six Dreamliners and is the only U.S. airline with the plane, has put the 787 back in its schedule starting May 31, with a flight from Houston to Denver. A route from Denver to Tokyo is scheduled to resume June 10.

Mickey David, who works in technical services for a health care company, would like to get back on a Dreamliner after he flew on one three times from Houston to either Chicago or Los Angeles.

“I would love to get on this plane,” David says. “Since I exclusively fly United and many of the routes the 787 flies, I will seek out the plane again without a second thought.”

The composite plane is 20% more fuel efficient than similar models. Passengers compliment its quietness in flight, and its larger windows with electronic dimmers rather than shades.

Nancy Ilk, a consultant who flies out of Minneapolis, had lined up a Dreamliner flight between Houston and Denver. With nearly 2 million miles on United she was upgraded to first class.

But her flight was scheduled for the weekend after the plane was grounded. She’s been waiting months for another chance.

“I’m definitely still looking forward to flying the Dreamliner,” Ilk says.