2 Subway Lines Crippled by Fire; Long Repair Seen (NYC)

[NewYorkerfromMass]

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.

Y'know, I am so glad they have got the post 9/11 security all figured out here....

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/25/nyregion/25subway.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=

[hadrons]

1. This has been killing me the last few days ....

[NewYorkerfromMass]

2. Amazingly incompetent... no?

a feaking homeless guy does damage on the scale of a terrorist.

[Darknyte7]

3. Yes...

Amazing incompetence.

[Yavin4]

4. WhenYou See Bush, Pataki, and Bloomberg Surround Themselves

with 9/11, just remember how vulnerable our city is four years after the attacks.

[Tace]

5. Why Would It Take Them 3-5 years To Replace A Circuit Room?

It appears they want to take the opportunity to completely renovate the A and C lines. I live in Manhattan and am planning to move to Brooklyn in the spring, and commute by subway. This sucks.

[Alpharetta]

13. I agree. They're leveraging the fire

I don't care if they have to refab some vacuum tubes, there is NO WAY electronics in a room would take 3 years to replace.

[SOS]

16. True, except maybe in NYC

They've been putting in new wall and floor tile at my station for years now.

[NewYorkerfromMass]

18. Yeah, THAT'll stop them terra-ists!

Bring on more tiles!

[NYC]

6. Maybe it's cheaper to take care of homeless people

than to pay for damage like this. (An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.)

Yes, it would have been possible for a "terra-ist" to do this, but it wasn't done by a terra-ist, was it?

[havocmom]

11. There ya go! How much does it really cost America to ignore the needs

of Americans?

My granny used to say. "You pay for what you need, whether you buy it or not!" Message to lurking republicans: granny was a proud member of the GOP but it was a responsible party back in her day.

[ChaoticSilly]

12. Exactly

*rant on*

Not only the homeless, but also the uninsured, unemployed, uneducated - I just can't understand why people can't see that taking care of EVERYBODY is in EVERYBODY's best interest - not to mention being the right thing to do.

*rant off*

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

14. How do we know he was not a homeless terrarist?

Could be deep-cover op?

:tinfoilhat:

[durablend]

15. Just some "blue state punishment"

Gotta make em pay for voting against the monarchy.

Nothing to see here...

[KamaAina]

7. No-registration link from the Daily News

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/274609p-235134c.html

remeber, registration is just another tool to restrict the flow of information!

I can't imagine what this is doing to my old neighborhood (around 145th St.) The A (and D) trains were already jammed when they got down there. Now all that overflow will ensure that the B (the only other one left) is jammed, too. Yikes. I remember having to resort to the B to go down to 17th near 6th. Now I'd have no option at all.

The hell of it is, TheBus isn't that much better, 'specially in the afternoons when schoolkids, tourists, etc. collide with commuters.

[WilmywoodNCparalegal]

8. And we have the $76 a month Metrocard to show for it

while MTA execs are pocketing outrageous paychecks and bonuses....

:wtf:

[Lavender Brown]

9. the fares go up and up... the service seems to get worse and worse

For the past year, my entire neighborhood has basically been off-limits by subway every weekend. It can be a nightmare, it'll be worse without the A train.

[readmoreoften]

10. "the city put the number of homeless people in the subway at 582"

FIVE EIGHTY TWO? Are they kidding? Homeless advocates say there may be more. Shit, the average NYer tripping over bodies can tell you that. Okay, maybe 582 at stations in Manhattan. And two sleeping on each car of each train.

And what's this shit about 'people who used to wait for 5 minutes' are now going to wait for 18. I already wait for 15 minutes for the A at west 4th. What's it gonna be, an hour?

[rocktivity]

17. Years? YEARS???? WHY?

Either they issue an explanation, or everyone's city cars are taken away and replaced with Metro Cards!

:headbang:
rocknation

[TomClash]

19. In Bloomberg's New York . . .

. . . the Emperor has no clothes.

[TomClash]

IN NO OTHER CITY IN AMERIC A

would the MTA get away with saying it might be fixed in 3-5 years.

[oppositionmember]

20. Man, this is a devastating blow to the City.

You might say the "A" stands for "Aorta" and the "C" stands for "Carotid." New York straphangers are f-u-c-k-e-d.

[NewYorkerfromMass]

21. UPDATE: Now saying 6 to 9 months

I guess that end of the story didn't play too well with any incumbent mayors seeking re-election!
Meanwhile, the heat is on for lack of terrorism protection.

"Transit officials said yesterday that service on the A and C lines could be restored to full capacity in six to nine months, substantially revising their earlier prognosis that a fire in a Lower Manhattan signaling room would disrupt service on the lines for as long as three to five years.

The new time frame for repairs will still mean months of confusion and inconvenience on two lines that have an average weekday ridership of 580,000, and hardly diminishes how the fire underscored the vulnerability of a signaling system based on electromechanical switches that were first developed in the 1870's....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/26/nyregion/26subway.html?ei=5094&en=ef90a79eab94be1c&hp=&ex=1106802000&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print&position=

and the Times editorial rightly blames Pataki:

A Subway, Not a Shelter

It started with a very cold night and, probably, a homeless person - one of hundreds hiding in the subway. A fire was lighted somehow and spread, incinerating a small control room. That loss of wires, cables and connections doomed almost 600,000 New Yorkers to various levels of commuter hell for months and possibly years.

The New York City Transit obviously has to make repairs fast, while also shoring up other similar control rooms - there are perhaps a dozen - throughout the city's antiquated subway system. Obviously, the first estimate of up to five years to fully restore the A and C lines was unacceptable. After a storm of criticism, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and city transit officials shortened that estimate yesterday to six to nine months for returning to the old schedule, a vast improvement. But that had better just be the start.

The subway is also no place for the homeless, and it's a sign of the system's shaky state that hundreds of people have been allowed to live in its grapevine of tunnels and passageways. It is not safe for them and, as Sunday's fire makes clear, it is not safe for the millions who ride through those tunnels every single day. The city's police and homeless outreach programs need to be mobilized right away.

Infuriated riders who need to vent their anger should understand that neither the station manager nor City Hall is the right target. The buck really stops at Gov. George Pataki's office. He appoints the people who run the M.T.A., and his proposed budget skimps on the kind of maintenance and infrastructure upgrading that could help prevent the disruptions subway riders are seeing this week.

Mr. Pataki could start getting involved by contacting Lawrence Reuter, president of New York City Transit, and his team to make sure they work harder to communicate with commuters. Garbled announcements and bad advice from transportation workers have added to riders' frustrations in recent days. If the delays are inevitable, the confusion about how to cope with them is not.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/26/opinion/26wed5.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=

[Rose Siding]

22. "This obviously wasn't -- we think -- terrorism . . ."

What's so obvious about it? Isn't this exactly the kind of "soft" target we hear about? Barring an arrest that proves otherwise, AFAIC the only thing missing is a claim of responsibility.

*that quote is from the WP
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36304-2005Jan25.html