Photo Courtesy of Marc Hermann
Governor Hochul and MTA Acting Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber
By Michael V. Cusenza
Governor Kathy Hochul on Monday ripped the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for Sunday night’s subway system breakdown that sparked a devastating five-hour service disruption involving a total of 83 trains along the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and L lines—and ordered a review to find out the root cause of the problem.
According to Con Edison, the utility lost a feeder for a short period of time that resulted in a voltage dip across the five boroughs. At about the same time, two power plants and generators went offline. It was a momentary outage that did go to the backup system. When it tried to go back to normal, there was an unprecedented surge that resulted in the subway losing signalization and communication ability; and it lost that between its command center and the trains throughout the system.
The issue ended up leading to evacuations in the tunnels: two of those evacuations were orderly and directed by emergency personnel; in two other cases, the experience was what was known as self-evacuation, where riders decided to leave on their own.
“Let me be very clear: Last night was unacceptable. If you’re one of those riders or people relying on safe transport, the system failed you,” Hochul said. “The MTA is the lifeblood of the city, and a disruption of this magnitude can be catastrophic. And thank God, when you think about the time that this happened. It was a time of low ridership. It was on a weekend night, late at night. And I can only imagine how devastating this would have been for thousands of New Yorkers had this occurred during a morning commute like this morning. So I’m immediately directing a review to find out the root cause of the service issues last night. We need to know why the system broke down and why there’s a breakdown of communications between the rail center, the rail control center and the trains. I would also be clear that we’ve had no indication of any malicious actions that would, that would have created the situation, and that’s why I want to find out exactly what happened to prevent it from happening again.
“What we experienced was a lot of anxiety for the citizens of the city who happened to be on the trains, and on the five trains in particular that were between the stations over 550 people were affected,” Hochul added. “Again, this is a scary situation, something we don’t want New Yorkers to ever have to experience again. And again, I say this was unprecedented. The confluence of events that led to this has never happened before to our knowledge.”
Leading straphanger advocacy group Riders Alliance also weighed in on the Sunday night’s breakdown.
“Governor Hochul clearly must prioritize the resilience of both our transit system itself and vital supporting infrastructure, including power sources and distribution networks,” Riders Alliance Policy & Communications Director Danny Pearlstein said. “At the same time, other leaders, from Sen. Schumer in his federal budget negotiations, to the mayor—who determines whether to put bus riders first on busy streets and create critical connectivity and redundancy with the subway—play decisive roles in how easily and equitably millions of people travel throughout the city.”
