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Electrical explosion forces evacuation of Green Line commuters near North Station
By adamg on Thu, 08/06/2009 - 8:17am
Boston Police tweet an "electrical fire" at North Station has shut down the area and that Green Line passengers are being evacuated from the tunnel. "Expect delays," they laconically advise. The T reports no Green Line service north of Government Center, blames "a disabled train" and power problems. Look in the comments below for an eyewitness account and a possible explanation of what happened.
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Comments
I come here first
Before I commute by T, I always check Uhub, and this is why. Useful information - with details I can use! This way, I know what other T areas are screwed up, how long, etc.
UH is def the best for t info
Right on swirly. I do the same thing, and it even led me to do the previously unthinkable: I got a Twitter account and twitterrific, so I can contribute some hopefully helpful info about the status of the rapidly deteriorating service on the green line. Other posters have helped me out several times, so I hope to return the favor.
Got to North Station just after 8 am
and noticed a haze of smoke through the sunlight as I decended the stairs from the entrance by the Garden.
Went down onto the platform - there was an inbound E train that had been evacuated. Apart from a couple of cleaning people who were quietly motioning folks over to the Orange Line, there were NO ANNOUNCEMENTS, and NO T PERSONNEL on the scene to guide passengers (other than the displaced train operators, who were just "hanging out").
Orange Line was running pretty normal (less than 5 minute wait), but the train got really crowded because of all the Green Line refugees who got on at North Station and Haymarket.
Fun at Park Street
Michelle McColleet tweets:
acrid smoke and a bad smell
I got off the orange at North around 8. A really nasty smell hit as I got off the train - kind of acrid and toxic. When I got upstairs, there was smoke and 2 out-of-service Green Line trains. There were no announcements and no personnel directing people or saying what was going on or anything.
I was on that train
They told everyone to get off of the train, and as we were exiting there were a few loud booms and matching flashes of light. The car was rocking too but I'm not sure if that was from the explosions or the people jumping off as fast as they could. There was a small fire on the top of the second car. The smoke smelled horrible so I left and took the orange line from Haymarket.
They're running shuttle
They're running shuttle buses between Govt Ctr and Lechmere...I tried to tweet about it but I think we broke Twitter this am! I still can't get on.
Agreed that UH is the best place to go for T updates. No one else seems to know how to do it besides you guys!
Are the Globe's local news updates good for anything?
They haven't mentioned any of the multiple T failures over the past few days.
How many Globe senior reporters and editors....
....regularly take the T???
I'm guessing not a ton. I'd be happy to be corrected, however. Downright delighted, actually.
Metro reporters stuck on the T
We'd have great, scathing reports of MBTA failures, but they'd be late for news events, interviews, etc.
Heh, they'd be Twittering too....
...but seriously, one of the great dividing lines of the urban experience is whether you take public transportation regularly or drive a car.
The Globe folks do not appear to be all that familiar with traveling in T mode, at least based on local coverage.
And, yes, it does cut both ways. As a creature of the T (and occasionally bus or commuter rail), I confess to paying no attention to the frustrations of those who must deal with frequent stop-and-go traffic...it's another world to me.
Between that and the axing of City Weekly...
...the Globe's local coverage has really faltered. I used to see more news about T problems on the Local News posts.
This was not initially
This was not initially caused by catenary problems. What I heard is the car in question had some sort of motor and/or motor controller short which sent a surge of power back to the overhead wire. That in turn caused the overhead wire to burn/break and land back on the roof of the car, which in turn caused another series of arcing and a small fire on some of the roof equipment. The fire extnguished itself as the short in the wire tripped the sub-station and caused the power in the entire section to die; and once the power was dead, there was nothing to feed the electrical fire.
My guess would be that most of the immediate Green Line staff in the area were assisting in the evacuation of other cars stuck in the tunnels around North Station with no power. Once the fire had extinguished itself and everyone was evacuated from the car in question, it was probably a higher priority to evacuate the other trains vs. giving directions to the Orange Line.
It makes sense that the train operators and
inspectors on scene would be more concerned with evacuating passengers than giving information, but why weren't the CSAs stationed on the platform to do that?
BTW, a coworker who came in on the Orange Line about 8:45 told me the operator on the Orange Line train was advising folks wanting service to Lechmere to go to Downtown Crossing and take the Red Line to Government Center.
Why you couldn't Twitter
Twitter is down, due to their centralized nature (the better to keep it all proprietary) and a DoS attack:
http://status.twitter.com/post/157191978/ongoing-d...
I know, and my hands are shaking
Where'd I put that emergency crack?
Green line explosion
I was waiting on the platform at North Station for the Green line around 8am. I smelled smoke and the car in front of me had a fire on its roof. People were exiting that car but were not told to evacuate. They simply walked into the car right in front of it. I saw the wire catch and sparks flew everywhere. There were a few loud booms and smoke was everywhere as I ran up the stairs out of the subway. If the wire had snapped it could've shocked someone on the platform. The smoke was horrible. I just hope no one was hurt.
When I did exit people that were about to come down to the subways saw the smoke rise & thought it was a bomb from the noise.
No announcements were made, no one was evacuated while there was still time before it exploded, and no one was stopped from entering the subway.
Thanks for the report. MBTA FAIL.
Not only has MBTA been crapping on fundamental civil liberties with their random searches, but apparently they *still* cannot handle a simple *actual* emergency in North Station.
I assumed that there are general-purpose evacuation procedures that should've kicked in and at least evacuated the platform and got first-responders in there at the first sign of fire.
Can NTSB or some other credible outside experts be brought in to first investigate this incident and then audit existing MBTA safety and security practices?
I have a feeling, given this incident and what else we know externally of the MBTA, that top MBTA management needs to be called onto the carpet, asked to explain, and then probably each offered a sepuku kit. A carpet, we can replace.
That might be happening as we speak
How does David d'Alessandro as T General Manager hit you?
First they're hip-checking
now they're hitting? :)
I do think we'd be better off if top management had more engineering sensibility and less of the MBA and politician nature.
Go to a top MBA program, and they'll be all about some vague quality they call "leadership," and they'll spend most of their time networking. Go to a top engineering program, and they'll be all about figuring out how to make things work, and work well.
Photo of the train as it caught fire
Mikey C. was there.
He adds:
Thursday Morning Explosion
The fact that there has been little to no explanation as to what happened this morning is mind boggling. I was on the train when it happened and can say that for a few moments, the passengers had absolutely not a clue what was happening. It wasn't until the conductor screamed "cut power" and "everyone get off the car now" did people start to move. As we were getting off of the train there were a couple of loud booms and for a few moments we thought it was a bomb. It was then that people began frantically running out of the train. Chaos, no direction, nothing. As we looked back we could see flames coming out of the top of the car. Again, no direction. No MBTA staff guiding us in any direction. We asked an employee in the information booth where to go (after being redirected to Haymarket and told that trains would absolutely be running and they were not) who simply said - take the bus because there will be no trains. Upon exiting Haymarket a very cocky MBTA employee said "where do you think you're going" to which we answered "the woman downstairs said to grab the bus." His response "I make more money than her. Are you going to listen to her or me?"
The MBTA has some work to do!!