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Michelle Slade (left) and Maria Chappell (right) hard at work scrubbing and power washing the entrance of South Hayward Station during an overnight deep clean. Each BART station is deep cleaned every few months.  

Watch a short video of the cleaning process here.

Maria Chappell, a longtime overnight station cleaner at BART, has a series of photos stored on her phone of a station platform, wedged among images of her kids and grandchildren. The photos show almost nothing but the floor, and intentionally so.  

Chappell snapped the imagery on a recent weeknight after hours of scrubbing, sealing, and waxing the floors with fellow cleaning crew members. If you visit the station in person and look down, you can almost see your face reflected back at you; the flooring truly glitters and gleams after one of these regular, and labor-intensive, deep cleans.  

It’s hard work to make BART’s well-trafficked stations sparkle and shine. Each day, hundreds of people pass through, carrying dirt and grime on the soles of their shoes, along with trash, gum, and dust.  

Maria Chappell power washes the stairs. 

Chappell and her colleagues spend eight hours a night, working from 10pm to 6am, to make sure that riders travel through clean stations when the sun rises each day. They’re the late-night crew that takes care of the deep cleaning of stations – tasks that can’t be done during the day when scores of riders are passing through.  

Every station is cleaned throughout the day when the stations are open to the public. These cleaners handle tasks like picking up waste and mopping and disinfecting, including high-use areas like stairs, escalators, handrails, bathrooms, and Add Fare machines.  

Recently, BART doubled the frequency of overnight station deep cleans. These thorough cleans can take workers one to two weeks to complete, and each station in the system will get one every few months, depending on the station’s needs and busyness. BART also recently doubled the frequency of train car deep cleans. 

Dirt is blasted off stairs with the hot steam power washer, then the water is squeegeed into a nearby drain.  

Cleaners must be detail-oriented while also focusing on the big picture. Overnight cleaners begin their eight-hour shifts at 10pm. At that time, until the station closes around 1am, the cleaners will focus on the concourse and stairs, escalators and elevators, and public restrooms. They surround the work area with orange cones and caution tape to ensure passengers stay safe and out of the way. For safety reasons, platforms are cleaned only when the stations are closed for the night.  

The stairs and floors are always the dirtiest parts of the station, for obvious reasons. But the workers clean the entire station, scrubbing and power washing everything from the stairs and station walls, including metal paneling, to the restrooms. Smaller, more sensitive surfaces are washed and disinfected by spraying a cleaning agent on a rag and scrubbing manually. Bleach is used very minimally, solely for biohazard incidents.  

The shining platform floors at Hayward Station after cleaners scrubbed, sealed, and waxed them. 

The floor cleaning process, however, is the piece de resistance. Below is a snapshot of the procedure, which is used for station entrances, concourses, and platforms: 

1. Floors are dust mopped to capture loose dirt and dust bunnies.  
2. Cleaners run the magnum floor scrubber – a small Zamboni-like machine that’s operated manually – to scrub away socked-in grime and old floor sealant. Sometimes, an alkaline stripper is used to break up seriously caked-in dirt.  
3. Next, it’s time for the steam power washer, which reaches temperatures of 120 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit, and blasts away grime the magnum scrubber breaks up.  
4. The water from the power washer is squeegeed into drains. The stairs and floors are dried with dry mops.  

The above process is done every few weeks. But every four to six months – one to two months at busy stations – cleaners seal and wax the floors to keep dirt from building up and to make them sparkle. They use mops to carefully layer multiple coats of sealer, which keeps dirt from building up on the floor. Then, they mop multiple layers of wax onto the flooring to make it shine.  

A Foreworker oversees the process, assigning tasks based on priority and ensuring the crews are working to meet BART’s high standards.  

The Foreworker overseeing Chappell’s crew is Wendy Salazar, who started at BART nearly a decade ago as an overnight cleaner herself. The regular crew includes Chappell, Michelle Slade, Lynn Ensminger, and Josh Brown. They refer to themselves as “the Fremont Crew.”  

Foreworker Wendy Salazar is pictured behind a fare gate at South Hayward Station. 

Luis Villatoro, the Assistant Superintendent of System Service (the department that oversees cleaning), said Foreworkers with hands-on experience like Salazar are major assets to their crews.  

“She knows the process, how to get the work done, and how to run the machines,” he said.  

Like many BART employees, Salazar’s path to BART is a story in and of itself. Salazar graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in theater. At the time she applied to BART, she said she was “really just looking for a job that had insurance.”  

But the work and her fellow crew members made a deep impact on her. In the nine years she’s been with BART, she has seen herself mature.  

“I started here at 22,” she said. “I’ve basically grown up at BART.”  

As a cleaner, she said her colleagues gave her a lot of guidance, support, and encouragement. A Foreworker told her early in her career that they could see her as the boss in a few years. 

“And here we are,” she said. 

Sudsy water is power washed away near the Add Fare Machines.  

Salazar said the public might be surprised to learn how many components go into station cleaning and the specialized skills it requires. Cleaners at BART are trained for two-and-a-half weeks in a classroom setting, as well as on the job.  

Salazar said her staff take immense pride in their work.  

“On the overnight shift, you handle the bigger projects, and you get to immediately see the results,” she said. “Cleaners get to say, ‘Hey, I did that!’”  

Or, like Chappell, they snap a photo to remind themselves of their hard work and the gratification of a job well done.  

Live Author Talk with Margaret Wilkerson Sexton and Vanessa Hua

Wednesday, Nov. 1, noon to 1pm at BART Headquarters (2150 Webster Street, Oakland)

Register at this link. 

Members of the public and BART employees are invited to BART Headquarters in Oakland for a live author talk with Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, author of the fall 2023 book club selection, On the Rooftop, moderated by Vanessa Hua, author of the national bestseller Forbidden City: A Novel. The event is free. 

You must sign up to attend in-person. A limited number of seats are available.

Oakland's A Great Good Place for Books will be selling copies of Margaret Wilkerson Sexton's and Vanessa Hua's books. The authors will sign copies of their books after the talk. 

If you can't attend in person, the talk will be livestreamed on Zoom. Click this link at the start of the event to watch. No registration is required for the livestream. 

Click here for more information about One Book One BART. 

At SweaterFest '24 this past weekend, we invited attendees to write wintery poems all about BART, and nearly 100 poets stepped up to pen BART odes that would make the Bard proud (had he stuck around long enough to see the invention of mass rail transit). Reading through the works, we were struck by the profound professions of love for transit, which rivaled Shakespeare's finest romances. BARTy is to the Bay as Juliet is to Romeo. Some of the poems even brought tears to BART employees' eyes! 

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The rules were simple: Start each sentence with the specified letters and include mention of a few transit-y words.

We invite you to read some of our favorite poems in the slideshows. Click and hold on a poem to pause the slideshow.

Happy holidays to all and to all a safe ride!

Didn’t make it to SweaterFest? 

There’s still time to buy a sweater, scarf, and beanie (the sweater vests are sold out). Head to Railgoods.com to get your BART holiday swag! 

Sandra Escalante pictured above at El Cerrito Plaza Station. 

Happy International Women’s Day! BART is celebrating Women’s History Month by sharing stories about the incredible women who work with and have impacted our agency. Stay tuned for additional content. 

In the construction world, small business owner Sandra Escalante said she is often referred to as a “unicorn.”  

“I’m a woman, a minority, and a member of the LGBT community,” she said recently. “It’s very difficult just to be an employee in the construction world. A business owner? Ha.”  

Escalante owns Laner Electric Supply Company, a wholesale distributor of electrical and lighting tools and supplies headquartered in a 16,000-square-foot warehouse in Richmond, Calif. The company is one of 670 small businesses supported by BART’s Small Business Support Services (SBSS), a program operated by BART’s Office of Civil Rights. SBSS provides a variety of free services to small businesses owned by women, minorities, disabled veterans, and members of the LGBT community, that are looking to bid on BART construction contracts or require technical assistance on active BART construction contracts.  

Escalante happens to meet every single one of the criteria for participation in SBSS. In addition to working with the program, she also served for multiple years on BART’s Business Advisory Council.  

In her interview with BART, Escalante confessed that owning a small business “is not easy,” and all the more so if you’re a woman or minority.  

"Programs like SBSS are the beginning of changing mindsets,” she said. “If you don’t change mindsets, nothing will change materially." 

Escalante’s path to entrepreneurship has been long, winding, and full of challenges. After leaving an engineering program in the Philippines when she was young, Escalante joined the military. When they found out she was gay, they kicked her out. Escalante then went on to work for the U.S. Postal Service, walking up and down the hills of San Francisco “with a mail bag that was bigger than me.” In time, she landed at a construction management firm as a mail clerk working for $10 an hour. Little by little, she climbed up the industry ladder.  

Throughout her career, Escalante said she’s “had to break a lot of glass ceilings." She can share numerous anecdotes of people in the room discriminating against her. When she was helming major companies, she was sometimes mistaken for the secretary, she said. Once, an administrator refused to order her business cards because “only men get them, not women." 

Everything she’s experienced in her many decades of experience has only fueled her internal fire. It’s also compelled her to “pay it forward.” In addition to serving on a number of business advisory councils, including BuildOUT California, an LGBT industry association, Escalante is a hands-on mentor for up-and-coming entrepreneurs, many of whom are treading a path trod by Sandra herself.

 It's a lot of time and effort, but she believes sharing her knowledge and experience is important. 

“If there are people out there that are not just looking out for themselves, the good comes back to them,” Escalante said of her mentoring efforts. “It’s karma. Don’t do things for yourself, and the rest will fall into place.” 

Before she took over Laner Electric, Escalante held a series of executive positions in the construction industry. Though she has decades of experience under her belt, Escalante said she’s never stopped learning, especially in her current role as the CEO and president of a small business.  

She said BART’s SBSS program, especially its pre-award administrator, Paul Pendergast, has supported her in a variety of ways, including editing capability statements (promotional/marketing documents that advertise a company and its services); advising on ways to secure funding; helping her craft requests for proposals (documents that announce and describe a project to solicit bids); and offering technical support. Pendergast even hired Escalante a coach to help her conquer her stage fright ahead of speaking engagements.  

Pendergast said he hasn’t “met many entrepreneurs who have donated as much time as Escalante to advocating for all small businesses.” 

“With Sandra, it is always about lifting ‘all boats’ equally,” he said.  

Escalante knows well the challenges of owning and operating a business as a woman and a minority. But she’s never given up, even after she experienced a debilitating stroke and heart attack in 2006 that continues to have lasting effects on her.  

Her responsibility to her employees keeps her going despite the setbacks, she said, and she’s learned to ask for help when she needs it, including by reaching out to services like SBSS.  

"[SBSS] is actually making a difference,” she said in closing. “I hope BART continues to expand it and keeps taking chances on small businesses.”