The District’s first report on the fatal Metro smoke incident will come out sooner than expected, Mayor Muriel Bowser said this afternoon. But even then, it will be a long wait to get all the answers about what happened near the L’Enfant Plaza station on Monday.

The report on the D.C. Fire and EMS response to the incident will come out within the next 48 hours, according to Bowser. That’s moved up from Tuesday, when Bowser predicted that the report would be ready sometime early next week.

The report, which covers 911 calls, radio communications, and a 100-page event chronology, comes after the timeline released by the District today. The report’s early release should come as good news to D.C. Council judiciary committee chairman Kenyan McDuffie, who put out a press release earlier this week saying he “expected” to receive the report on Monday—-and presumably planned to raise a stink if it took much longer than that.

The timeline showed firefighters reaching the station within nine minutes of the first call, around 3:31 p.m. According to Bowser, though, the first evidence that firefighters reached the train comes from a passenger’s phone call at 3:48 p.m., raising the question of why it took so long to reach the train.

The District plans to release another, later report that includes questions about whether firefighters’ radios worked underground and how the District’s Office of Unified Communications played into the response. But Bowser said there are still questions about the incident, including when the train was disabled and when the smoke started appearing.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery