MTA Looks for Answers After Subway Power Failure Strands Riders for Hours

By Barbara Russo-Lennon, amNY

Fear, frustration, and stress remained in high gear the day after thousands of NYC subway riders were left stuck in the subways of Downtown Brooklyn following a power failure during the evening rush hour.

The chaos started when the power went out at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, December 11 between the Jay Street-MetroTech and Hoyt-Schermerhorn stops on the A, C, F, and G lines in Downtown Brooklyn. MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber said an explosion at a Con Edison substation caused a “big section” of the transit system to lose power.

Some 3,500 subway passengers were safely evacuated from two of the trains within three hours of the failure. Many straphangers began leaving the trains on their own and walking through the tunnels, which Lieber said prevented the MTA from restarting the power and the trains.

“They left the trains and started to walk out on the roadbed,” Lieber said during an unrelated December 12 press conference in Queens. “It became more difficult to get the trains out of the station because, obviously, you can’t activate the electricity of the third rail where they are moving around the tunnels on their own.”

Looking for answers
On Thursday, state officials and New Yorkers — including Governor Kathy Hochul — were looking for explanations for the underground meltdown.

“New Yorkers deserve a world-class subway system, and thousands of commuters experienced unacceptable service issues last night due to an electrical issue,” Hochul said in a statement Thursday morning. “No one deserves to be trapped underground for two hours, or face such significant delays when trying to commute home from work.”

Hochul directed the MTA and Con Edison to review the system and investigate the exact cause of the power failure.

“This is bad stuff,” he said. “This is what you never want to happen to our riders, but we are investigating it with Con Edison to find the cause.”

It is unclear right now if there were any injuries. But riders were unsurprisingly shaken by the event.

“Some people were kind of losing it,” Anders Nelson, one of the stranded riders, said in a Gothamist article. “Calling the conductor on the little call box and asking all these questions. The conductor kept coming on every 20 minutes or so and just saying there’s a power outage, we can’t move, we don’t have AC, they’re working on it.”

Meanwhile, public transit advocates expressed frustration at the system’s aging infrastructure.

“With power, signal, and mechanical failures again delaying riders on our aging subway system, it’s clear that Governor Hochul was right to unpause congestion pricing and that she must continue to prioritize funding for the next slate of transit upgrades in her budget next month,” said Danny Pearlstein, police and communications director of the Riders Alliance.

Lieber remarked the 90-year-old electrical facility where the failure occurred is in urgent need of repair and investment. He added that he made it a priority in the capital program because “power is a huge issue.”

But he also said that he did not want to put all the responsibility on Con Ed, and stressed the importance of repairing older pieces of the system.

“I want to acknowledge that there is at least a piece of the causation is on an electrical substation in the MTA system that should have been repaired and replaced decades ago,” he said.

Editor’s note: A version of this story originally ran in amNY. Click here to see the original story.

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