Posted on 01/24/2005 7:24:53 PM PST by neverdem
Two of the city's subway lines - the A and the C - have been crippled and may not return to normal capacity for three to five years after a fire Sunday afternoon in a Lower Manhattan transit control room that was started by a homeless person trying to keep warm, officials said yesterday.
The blaze, at the Chambers Street station used by the A and C lines, was described as doing the worst damage to subway infrastructure since the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001. It gutted a locked room that is no larger than a kitchen but that contains some 600 relays, switches and circuits that transmit vital information about train locations.
The A line will run roughly one-third the normal number of trains - meaning that riders who used to wait six minutes for a train might now have to wait 18 minutes - while the C train will cease to exist as a separate line, at least for the time being. The C will be replaced by the V in Brooklyn. Long waits and erratic service are likely to be the norm for 580,000 passengers who previously relied on the A and C each weekday.
Riders on the West Side of Manhattan and in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of East New York and Ocean Hill-Brownsville will find the available trains more crowded, and will likely seek alternate subway lines, crowding them as well.
"This is a very significant problem, and it's going to go on for quite a while," said Lawrence G. Reuter, the president of New York City Transit. He estimated it would take "several millions of dollars and several years" to reassemble and test the intricate network of custom-built switch relays that were destroyed in the blaze, which officials believe began when the homeless person - who has not been found - set fire to wood and refuse in a shopping cart in the tunnel about 50 feet north of the Chambers Street station.
The flames quickly spread to a series of electrical cables. "Those cables short-circuited as a result of the fire, causing arcing as well as fire inside a relay room," said a Fire Department spokesman, Michael R. Loughran.
The fire underscored the fragility of the antiquated mechanical equipment that keeps the subways moving and of the sensitive nodes where that equipment is stored. Officials said they believed that there were only two companies in the world that were able to repair the signals. One is based in Pittsburgh, and the other in Paris.
The fixed-block signaling system has been in use since the New York subway's inception in 1904. The transit agency has invested $288 million on its first computerized signaling system, scheduled to make its debut on the L line in Brooklyn and Manhattan in July. Computer-based train operation has been a goal of transit planners for decades, but since 1982 the transit agency has focused its capital spending on basic maintenance.
Dozens of signal relay rooms like the one destroyed on Sunday are scattered throughout the 722-mile subway system, and it is impossible to fireproof them, Mr. Reuter said. Firefighters had to forcibly remove the bolts when they arrived at the locked relay room on Chambers Street, but the locks did nothing to prevent the fire from entering.
Until Wednesday, there will be no A service between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. at Spring, Canal and Chambers Streets and at the Broadway-Nassau station in Manhattan and at the High Street station in Brooklyn to allow workers to perform critical repairs. During those hours, the A will operate on the F track between West Fourth Street in Manhattan and Jay Street in Brooklyn. Supervisors will manually operate signals using two-way radios and observation.
The transit agency said in a statement that there were "no plans for the restoration of C service in the near future."
An expert on the city's subways expressed amazement that a single fire in a confined space could have such a long-lasting impact. "It seems astonishing that a single signal room would be so central to the operation of the line that it would take five years to recover from," said Clifton Hood, a transit historian at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y. "That's about as long as it took to build that entire line of the IND."
The first segment of the Independent Subway System, of which the A and C are a part, opened in 1932. The city's three subway divisions were unified in 1940. Professor Hood noted that four stations that were closed after the Sept. 11 attack were reopened in a year.
Yesterday morning, the first commute since the blaze gave a taste of the irritation that awaits riders in the days and weeks to come. "All I can do is wait here and hope for the best," said Ana Reyes, 51, a medical receptionist from Boerum Hill who had waited half an hour for the A train at the Jay Street station in Brooklyn. "Nobody tells you anything, so I just follow everyone else. If a train comes, I'm getting on it, and I don't care where it goes."
Johanna Jainchill contributed reporting for this article.
Cutesy attempt at sarcasm, but the shopping cart full of crap is the sign of a homeless person.
Take the 2 or 3 train to Wall Street. Or the J M or Z stops somewhere close to the NYSE.
Except that all trains (except the E) have an above-ground section of their routes, and it is NOT particularly warm at those points.
If you have ever seen the size of kitchens in some NYC apartments, then you know that this room was truly small, indeed.
THe fire was caused -- not by Islam -- but by a homeless person who was trying to keep warm.
To my way of thinking, attirbuting something like this to "Islam" is not too much different from some of the rants I read over on DU about how President Bush made 9/11/01 happen "on purpose".
Both sorts of comments are motivated by hate, in my view.
And hate, when it is in full flower, results in the bombing of office buildings by fully-loaded commercial jet aircraft.
So, does Bloomy go with Pittsburgh or Paris?
Thanks! I guess I have a few options since I'll be transferring from a Q.
If you can transfer to a W or R train, you can take it to the Cortlandt Street stop, which just on the east side of the WTC site, on Church Street. I *think* there might be one stop further downtown, but I'm not 100% sure where it is.
You need to get a life DU troll
You seem never to read what is written to you---and then you take that poor read to make some moronic half-baked statement.
But that is to be expected of an apologist like yourself.
Chambers/WTC is underground, and the E terminates there.
For that matter it's a long ride to an above ground station on any train from Chambers.
If it really was a homeless guy, I expect he was simply deranged.
"Yes, the article was clear, but it took only five minutes for someone to implicate Islam. This knee-jerk B.S. is absurd."
About as absurd as you referring to anyone that happens to disagree with you as 1) a liar 2) Anti American or 3) a Bigot.
Still waiting for you to condemn the 9/11 attacks---but you just can't, eh?
Right, but if they're looking for a place to sleep, the E is it. There's a reason it's known as the "mobile homeless shelter" during the winters.
I have virtually no doubt it was a homeless person who did this. Terrorist attacks don't leave people scratching their heads days later and pondering whether or not it was terrorism.
Was planning on taking the C from Penn Station up to W77 st in a couple weeks...sounds like a cab is a better idea maybe? I'm not from NYC.
I suppose high heat could weaken and overload copper lines as the old insulation burned away; if there was aluminum wire it could have burned as well.
Sounds like a good time to hit the keepers-of-the-purse up for those millions for a new computerized system.
A lot of the homeless in NYC are mentally ill----but NY'er can thank Mario Cuomo for closing most of the state mental facilities and the liberals for saying the mentally ill (even the dangerously so) have the right to live where they want. They cna't even force the mentall ill to take theie medication in the hospital.
This is not the first fire that has happened---and not even the worst. A fire in '91 nearly wiped out the Staten Island Ferry's Whitehall Terminal. It was attributed to a homeleass camp---but the city tried to say it was electrical (but they forgot there wwas no wiring in the area it started!)
Guiliani, to his credit, put a stop to the worst of it--
Take the A train (music please!) to 42nd--switch to the Times Sq. Shuttle then take the #1 to 77th street
Maybe they will have the A train pick up the slack of the C----or maybe the C will run above Penn Station.
Go to
http://www.mta.nyc.ny.us/nyct/index.html
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