2nd Ave. Subway safety ‘rush job’

The MTA was so desperate to open the Second Avenue Subway that it skipped safety tests and ignored more than 17,000 construction defects to meet Gov. Cuomo’s Jan. 1 deadline, records revealed on Wednesday.

And more than eight months after a lavish gala to celebrate the first ride on the new line, it’s still operating under a temporary safety certificate that isn’t ex- pected to be finalized until November, according to monthly reports filed with the Federal Transit Administration.

As a stopgap measure, workers have been assigned to watch for fires, according to The New York Times, which first obtained the reports. The most recent report dates to May and listed 7,264 defects needing to be fixed.

A transit source told The Post there was still work to be done.

“It was a rush job, and there are a lot of things that are still out- standing,” the source said.

“When they opened, there were a lot of outstanding issues, including leaks and tests that weren’t done. They are still working through some of that.”

A January report to the FTA said the massive amount of problems with the project was a “concern.”

“Such a large number of discrepancies indicate a breakdown in the contractors’ quality-assurance program, the subcontractors’ quality-control program, and that quality was compro- mised for schedule acceleration,” the report says.

In a statement, MTA spokesman John McCarthy said: “The stations on the new Second Avenue line are completely safe, and they have been since the day they opened.

“They feature state-of-the-art technology for fire protection, closed-circuit monitoring and new public-address systems — any suggestion that safety was at all compromised to meet the deadline to open is patently false,” he added.