The 96th Street station on the West Side IRT sits empty on Tuesday night. (Photo via Victoria Kabak)
As the New York City transit network attempts to recover from what MTA Chairman Joe Lhota called the “worst devastation” in its 108-year-old history, the city is still, as Wednesday dawns, without subway or rail service. Even worst it’s unclear when subway service will return. The MTA says that no official decisions have been made and that no announcement will come until at least Wednesday. It could be days, if not weeks, until the full subway system is up and running.
On Tuesday evening, MTA Chairman Joe Lhota released a brief statement with some gruesome details but no timetable. He said:
The extent of Hurricane Sandy’s devastation became clear today, and its impact on the MTA system is severe. The New York City subway’s South Ferry station was flooded up to the ceiling. The Long Island Rail Road confronted 11 electrical substations in a row with no power. Metro-North Railroad crews found a boat across their tracks in Ossining. Each tube of the [Brooklyn-Battery] Tunnel is filled with 43 million gallons of water.
These are just a few of the many unprecedented challenges the MTA is facing as it tries to restore service. Our employees have been assessing the damage all day and will continue to work through the night. In many places, they have been able to begin the process of recovery by pumping water and clearing tracks. New York City buses went back on the road for limited service, and will be almost at normal strength by morning.
Still, our dedicated employees are beginning to make progress. By midday tomorrow, we will be able to discuss a timetable for service restorations.
Despite Lhota’s statement, it’s tough to get a handle on what services are running. The MTA plans to run a full slate of (free) buses on Wednesday, but those vehicles clearly won’t be passing through the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. Additionally, with the MTA’s website still showing its low-bandwidth emergency version, no bus route maps are available outside of those programmed into BusTime. You may also be better off with the dollar vans, as Cap’n Transit writes tonight.
No matter what happens on Wednesday though, the news is unlikely to be good. The glimpse inside South Ferry is but a preview of the flooding that plagues the system, and if the city’s newest $500 million subway station is that inundated with water, I can only imagine how the East River tubes look. Again, we’ll know more on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, reports from Metro-North and the Long Island Rail Road pain similarly grim pictures. With power outages, trees down and tunnels flooded, neither commuter railroad knows when any sort of service will be restored. Crews are working around the clock to clear the tracks and repair damges, but the destruction is widespread throughout the region. For instance, as Metro-North said in a statement, “On the New Haven Line, so many trees fell on the catenary wires that workers decided to concentrate on clearing and repairing just two of the four tracks, a process that is not yet complete.” That doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface.
So we wait. As life in much of the city slowly returns to normal — as restaurants open and bars serve thirsty patrons, as work beckons us all back to our desks — the great people-mover that gets us from our homes to our offices remains offline. Hopefully, we’ll know more on Wednesday, but as this sobering article from Bloomberg News warns, it could be a while.
