LONG ISLAND CITY, Queens (WABC) -- New York Governor Kathy Hochul said Monday an "unprecedented strategy breakdown" led to fractional of the nation's largest subway strategy losing powerfulness Sunday night, stranding hundreds of riders and crippling work for hours.
Governor Hochul called the outage "unacceptable" and told the riders who recovered themselves stranded, "the strategy failed you." She's present calling for an interior probe into the failure.
The bid of events started astatine 8:25 p.m. erstwhile a Con Ed powerfulness surge forced the subway's awesome strategy to power to backmost up power. That secondary powerfulness proviso held until astir 9:10 p.m. erstwhile it mysteriously failed, an MTA spokesperson sad, disabling signaling for each of the numbered trains arsenic good arsenic the L train.
An MTA spokesperson said the outage did not impact the subway's 3rd rail, which powers the idiosyncratic cars. That means that radical stuck connected the trains inactive had lights and aerial conditioning, until immoderate riders opted to self-evacuate into tunnels.
That added to the chaos, forcing the MTA to chopped the powerfulness to 4 trains clustered astir 149th St. Grand Concourse, leaving those riders successful the acheronian without aerial conditioning.
Service was afloat restored by 1:29 a.m connected Monday.
At a property league Monday greeting extracurricular MTA Headquarters successful Lower Manhattan, Governor Hochul said much than 500 radical either had to beryllium evacuated oregon chose to self-evacuate, opting to permission trains connected their own, navigating acheronian tunnels. With the 3rd obstruction inactive active, she called that "dangerous" and urged radical not to bash that if it happened successful the future.
Around the clip of the outage, cellphone video showed a manhole occurrence successful Long Island City, Queens. Governor Hochul said determination was nary crushed to judge that occurrence caused the outage, but that it was nether investigation.
Video from wrong the 149th St. Grand Concourse presumption showed FDNY firefighters lifting radical up disconnected the tracks and onto the presumption platform. Riders told Eyewitness News they had small connection from the MTA.
"They kept saying they don't cognize what's going on. But an hr and 36 minutes we were trapped connected the train. A agelong time. Kids, children, nary water, nothing," 1 pistillate said.
Now, the MTA volition behaviour an "after-action" study to find wherefore the strategy failed.
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