MASSIVE HOSE JOB
Transit honchos push to unclog drains & curb crippling delays
Decades of mismanagement forced the MTA into a costly cleanup of subway drains — a multimillion-dollar repair job necessary to speed trains and improve service.
For years, water hardly flowed through the system’s 10,000 drains, which are meant to pump 13 million gallons of water out of the system on dry days, and millions of gallons more when it rains.
The bulk of the drains were filled to the brim with several feet of mud, silt and trash. “The whole system was ineffective,” said a high-ranking MTA source. “The water didn’t get to the end, where it’s got to go.”
Excess water on the 418 miles of underground track can make sensors and switches malfunction. It can spark track fires when it hits the third rail. “It f—-s everything up,” said an MTA superintendent.
The MTA was urged to solve the problems in a February 2006 report by its inspector general, completed a year and a half after the subway flooded when 2 inches of rain blasted the city in just an hour.
“Transit didn’t even have good maps of where their drains and check valves [that prevent water taken out of the system from flowing back in] were located,” said Beth Keating, an inspector general employee who worked on the report. “We went into archives and into engineers’ basements. We found the drainage locations and started taking people out with us to look at them,” Keating said.
But the inspector general’s work came to naught. MTA officials didn’t keep the inspector general’s drain map, and system engineers were back at square one a decade later as the subway fell into a crisis.
MTA managers were not proactive about clogged drains. When standing water was spotclear ted on the tracks, crews would clear the drain and move on. Few records were taken, and there was no master plan to the pipes.
“There was a lack of a sophisticated maintenance management system,” acknowledged Sally Librera, NYC Transit’s head of subways.
“The clogged drains were a symptom of a system that’s diseased,” said Transport Workers Union International President John Samuelsen. “The reason the drains got clogged to begin with is because there were no resources being pumped into the subway. The cleaning of the drains became less of a priority than something that could trigsubways ger a derailment.”
Some of the $836 million Subway Action Plan — established two years ago to save the from looming disaster — was devoted to fixing the problem. The plan included $198 million for track and maintenance work between 2017 and 2019, part of which went to the drainage project.
MTA officials say the drainage system — in places more than a century old — has been mostly repaired. Crews have cleared out 99% of the subway’s drains over the last two years, and have set up a system to keep track of them.
Managers now have a comprehensive database of the