THE GREAT DISAPPEARING ACT...

Take this item for what it's worth...

We hear from a reliable source that shortly after the explosion at Ogontz and Olney on Friday, Fearless Leader was reportedly paged as she was about to leave for the weekend. Presumably, she was paged in hopes that she'd report to Olney Terminal to help coordinate the mass chaos up there. According to a spy down in Center City, she reportedly went home instead.

The knee jerk reaction would be to wonder why the chief executive officer of a major transit agency would not want to respond to what was a major operational nightmare in North Philadelphia. Yet, at the same time, that's why there's a control center. That's why there's supposed to be senior managers who are supposed to handle these things.

One area where SEPTA failed was in communicating to it's passengers via the internet. Though I didn't have a chance to confirm this, some of our contributors report that SEPTA made no mention of any detours around Olney Terminal (it was later learned that buses were diverted to Fern Rock) on its web site. Apparently, the people responsible for maintaining the home page of the web site only work during normal business hours; it didn't occur to anyone that not everyone may have been aware about the explosion and had logged onto the web site thinking all was well at Olney.

Of course, when you're dealing with a transit system that seems to place customer relations at the bottom of its priority lists, this can't really come as a shock...