NEAR-MISS incidents at the MBTA between maintenance staff and vehicles keep on coming.

At a meeting of a safety subcommittee of the MBTA board last Thursday, T staff disclosed there had been four near misses between March 13 and April 7. Most were caused by poor communication between maintenance workers, train operators, and staffers in the subway operations control center.

On April 13, as T officials were briefing board members on the four previous incidents and what was being done to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future, an employee was seriously injured while working in an area of the subway system where access had not been requested or granted. Details on the employee’s injuries were not available.

The very next day the MBTA experienced yet another near miss.

The outbreak of near misses has prompted officials at the Federal Transit Administration and the Department of Public Utilities, the T’s state safety oversight agency, to impose more stringent reporting requirements governing maintenance work on the subway system. No-notice inspections will also be conducted, officials said.

“Given recent events, the results of FTA’s on-site inspections, reports from DPU, and the MBTA’s backlog of maintenance work which necessitates continued track access for work crews, FTA finds that a combination of unsafe conditions and practices exist such that there is a substantial risk of death or personal injury,” said Joe DeLorenzo, the chief safety officer at the FTA, in a letter to MBTA General Manager Phillip Eng on Tuesday.

Eng told the MBTA board on Wednesday that the near-miss incidents “are avoidable and should not be happening.”

The incidents are occurring at a time when the T is under extreme pressure to address defects that had been identified by earlier rail scans but never fixed. The defects are what prompted the imposition of slow zones on roughly a quarter of the subway system.

The new work rules and reporting requirements could slow down the repair work.

The T had 1,000 engineering and maintenance staff undergo safety recertifications for working in the subway system. Eng said 800 workers had completed the recertification process as of earlier this week.

The general manager also said he is trying to empower workers to individually address safety concerns as they arise. “Any worker can stop working if they believe it is not being done safely,” he said.

“My goal is to instill a fix-it-now and fix-it-right culture,” he added.