Governor Kathy Hochul directed a review of the system breakdown that led to a disruption in subway service in New York City and held a briefing with MTA officials.
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"The trains that were affected were the numbers lines 1 through 7, as well as the L train. Eighty-three trains were affected but what was most concerning was the five trains that had been stuck between stations. This ended up leading to evacuations in the tunnels and two of those evacuations were orderly and directed by the emergency personnel.
"In two other cases, the experience was what was known as self-evacuation, where riders decided to leave on their own. We never, ever want riders to do that. It is dangerous and it caused a delay in the restoration of power. The tracks are dangerous and the last train was re-platformed.
"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. 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. So we did have a rolling restoration. It would have happened earlier, and this happened at 1:30 a.m.
"It could have happened around midnight, except we had to make sure, working closely with the FDNY, that because of the self-evacuation that they had to go examine all the tracks to make sure that there were no people on them. That was a very dangerous situation. So that did delay the restoration of power. It could have been restored by midnight. But by 1:30, all trains are restored in the morning, commute operations are going normally.
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. 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 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.
"As a result of the review I directed this morning, the MTA has uncovered a sequence of failures that resulted in some backup systems not providing power as designed last night, including an additional failure to quickly diagnose the underlying cause.
"My message to the riders is this: We are working to find out the full extent of what went wrong, and we will fix it. New Yorkers deserve absolute confidence in a fully functioning subway system, and I promise to do everything in my power to restore that confidence." ■