Subway service resumed on the F and G lines in downtown Brooklyn at 5:57 a.m. Thursday — with 20-minute delays on some lines in the morning rush — after an explosion in the system’s State Street power substation brought service to a frightening halt on the lines Wednesday night.
By late morning, train service had returned to normal, with third-rail power patched in from nearby MTA substations. But transit sources told the Daily News an investigation into the cause of the explosion was ongoing – and that the subterranean substation remains out of commission for the foreseeable future.
“A 90-year-old electrical substation had a fire — an explosion of some kind, because the door was off the hinges,” MTA chairman Janno Lieber bluntly told reporters Thursday morning.
Yet exactly what caused Wednesday’s explosion and subsequent power loss remained unclear. Initial reports from ConEd — the power utility that provides tens of thousands of volts of electrical power to each of the MTA’s substations — said there had been a problem with one of the feeder lines entering the State Street facility.
Lieber said his agency’s aging equipment likely played a part.
“We are investigating, with ConEd, the exact cause,” Lieber said. “But I don’t want to put it on ConEd, I want to acknowledge that at least a piece of the causation seems to be an electrical substation in the MTA system that should have been repaired and replaced decades ago.”
“This is a 90-year-old electrical facility,” he added, “exactly what we have identified as in urgent need of repair and investment.”
Substations like the State Street facility are scattered throughout the subway system, where they convert the high voltage, alternating-current feed from ConEd’s power plants into the 600 volt, direct-current power needed to run the subway trains.
As previously reported by The News, the MTA is seeking $4 billion to overhaul the oldest parts of the subway’s aging power grid. Lieber said the State Street substation had been at the top of the MTA’s to-do list.
MTA officials were unable Thursday to tell The News exactly which components of the State Street substation were damaged, or how long it might take to repair or replace them.
Wednesday night’s outage stranded some 3,500 straphangers underground in a pair of F trains for two-and-a-half hours. Three other trains were momentarily stuck in tunnels as well, but passengers were able to exit onto station platforms. Officials said one rider was transported for asthma treatment; no transit workers were injured.
“Last night was a bad night for New Yorkers,” Lieber said. “This is what you never want to happen to your riders.”
