Angel Franco/The New York Times
Passengers crowded trains Monday at the Atlantic Avenue station in Brooklyn.
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.
Angel Franco/The New York Times
Passengers crowded trains Monday at the Atlantic Avenue station in Brooklyn.
Was the "homeless person" named Mohammed, by any chance?
Ahhh....reminds me of the good old days!
"If George W. Bush becomes president, the armies of the homeless, hundreds of thousands strong, will once again be used to illustrate the opposition's arguments about welfare, the economy, and taxation."--Mark Helprin, Oct. 31, 2000
Reminds me of the book by Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged.
"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."
But then I read further, and thought: "Who wants to sell the City another computerized signaling system?
The fixed-block signaling system has been in use since the New York subway's inception in 1904. The transit agency has invested $288 million on its first computerized signaling system, scheduled to make its debut on the L line in Brooklyn and Manhattan in July. Computer-based train operation has been a goal of transit planners for decades, but since 1982 the transit agency has focused its capital spending on basic maintenance.
FReepmail me if you want on or off my New York ping list.
Oh, terrific. That explains why the A train took such a very long time to get from Penn Station to Broadway-Nassau this afternoon. Plus I noticed bright lights in a control room next to the Chambers Street station and about 20 or 30 hardhats in there working on something.
The train before ours was evidently having problems, so they dumped all the passengers at the Broadway-Nassau station--last stop before Brooklyn--and our already crowded car was overwhelmed with people trying to get on. I was very glad to be getting off there, finally.
I'm really looking forward to half-hour delays every time I take the subway downtown. For five years?
Since Giuliani left office, the homeless people have been moving back into the subway tunnels and stations. Now we see what the results can be. Frankly I expected this to happen earlier, because our new mayor is a cretin. But this is not a good sign.
Maybe it was some poor NYer who needed a ciggy real bad, and had to go into the bowels of the subway system for a few puffs. I understand it is a capital crime these days in NYC to light up anywhere.
You're being much too charitable to Bloomboob.
At a minimum, this article demonstrates the sheer incompetence on the part of transit security officials. Such a critical comm vault should have been monitored and equipped with fire suppression capability.
That's @#$#@#@$@#! I have a job interview on thursday on Broad St!
This is nonsense. It is very easy to keep warm on the New York subway. All you have to do is get on a train. They are heated.
The psychotics among the homeless are not aware to make that choice.
You can try taking the E to the WTC stop (yes, I know there's no longer any WTC!) and then just walk east on Fulton.
Another option is the 2 and 3 trains.
I seriously doubt it's going to take 5 years to get back to normal. It was 14 months after 9/11 that they got every single station (except the 1/9 stop that was below the WTC) back in pre-9/11 shape.
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