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Maybe they call it the Orange Line because of the glow from all the trash fires
By adamg on Wed, 01/19/2011 - 3:16pm
For the second day in a row, Orange Line service was interrupted by a trash fire on the tracks at a station, this time at Chinatown. Boston Fireman reports the fire started shortly before 3 p.m. on the inbound side and that firefighters made short work of it.
Yesterday's trash-in-the-pit fire was at Downtown Crossing. Today's fire was Chinatown's first in more than four days. Tom Bruno suggests:
The MBTA needs a sign at each station: "No fires in ___ days"
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Comments
The catch the T app needs a
The catch the T app needs a flaming icon so we know which stations and trains are on fire.
New app icon
We'll work on it!
Its mostly copies of the
Its mostly copies of the Metro and Dunkin Donuts litter right? Lotto tickets and candy wrappers? Charge the Metro and the station vendors a fee to push their product in stations, use the money to pay for more cleaning crews.
Speaking of copies, are these now copy-cat fires?
Are surveillance cameras showing how the fires are starting? With so many so close together, I have to wonder if there are copy cats out there, knowing they can briefly shut down an entire line.
Or ...
It could be all those sparks from Orange Line trains running along wet third rails setting off all the paper that just sits on the tracks.
But why now, all of a sudden?
But why now, all of a sudden? Has this happened in winters past?
They had annoucement ads about this problem before
They went through the trouble of having the Boston firefighter chief record a msg that they would play every 5 minutes to remind people to toss their trash in the bins or recycling bags. The # of fires actually dropped, but last month they had stopped playing them. Now the fires are coming up again.
The problem is when people toss their metros and globes into the track area, those papers eventually get sucked into the tunnels by the trains passing by. Eventually those papers get soaked by the greasing machines they have that lube the tracks every so often.
All it then takes is a spark from a train passing by to ignite those papers. Last year a spark actually ignited the grease machines and caused Downtown to smell horrible for close to a month.
Do other cities have this
Do other cities have this problem, or is it unique to the MBTA for some reason?
Think it's the result of cutbacks
The T used to have regular janitorial people comb through the tunnels when the trains were offline during the night hours. I believe they had made cutbacks on those people, so thus we have more paper piling up in the tunnels than before.
It also is partly affected by the age of our tracks and trains too.
The announcements have not stopped.
At what stations did the announcements cease? At DX and along the Orange line the announcements continue to add to the endless stream of noise that blathers out of the PA system.
Maybe Penelope is really a
Maybe Penelope is really a pyromaniac snake...