Line supervisors: KC Metro ‘playing COVID roulette’

KING COUNTY, Wash. — While many people are able to work from home, others can’t.

So King County Metro continues to provide bus service.

However, some employees claim social distancing is not being practiced throughout the transportation system.

Line supervisor Rod Burke told KIRO 7 he believes the lives of bus operators and supervisors are being endangered every day by the threat of contracting COVID-19.

“I feel like they’re playing COVID roulette,” Burke said of Metro management. “There’s nothing more harrowing than driving a bus full of people coughing, sneezing, hacking, and the hair on the back of your neck stands up.”

According to Burke and fellow line supervisor Fredrick Coats, while the county agency publicly touts its daily bus cleaning and social distancing efforts on board its coaches, hundreds of drivers every day come face to face with each other, in close quarters, at Metro bases.

“They’re not practicing their social distancing,” Coats said.

“My colleagues who are working in the office are coming within a couple of feet with several hundred drivers who sign in every day,” according to Burke.

As supervisors, it’s Burke and Coats’ job to transport drivers who become ill back to base.

After Coats recently picked up a violently sneezing bus operator, he said he notified his boss that he would no longer do it unless he could use a larger vehicle, and stay 6 feet away.

“I was told, either I do my job or I would have to use sick leave to go home,” Coats claimed.

In an emailed statement, a spokesman for King County Metro said the agency supports social distancing at all its workplaces, and celebrates employees as “the region’s unheralded heroes.”

Metro also claims the agency’s “#1 priority is the safety and health” of its “employees and customers.”

However, Coats and Burke do not believe King County Metro is prioritizing the safety of its employees at all.

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