Hochul rips MTA ‘failure’ to act fast in rail outage
Gov. Kathy Hochul said Monday that the MTA was slow to diagnose the cause of Sunday’s massive subway power outage — part of a series of transit snafus that disrupted train service for about five hours.
“As a result of the review I directed this morning, the MTA has uncovered a sequence of failures that resulted in some backup systems not providing power as designed last night, including an additional failure to quickly diagnose the underlying cause,” Hochul said.
The newly sworn-in governor announced she told the agency to hire outside engineers to investigate the blunder.
“I have directed the MTA to retain two independent engineering firms to assist in a thorough deepdive of what happened and make recommendations to ensure this does not occur again,” she said.
Hochul — after earlier in the day ripping the “unacceptable” service disruption and pledging to get to the bottom of what caused fivehour outage — vowed to work to increase commuters’ “confidence” in the public-transit system.
“My message to the riders is this: We are working to find out the full extent of what went wrong, and we will fix it,” she said. “New Yorkers deserve absolute confidence in a fully functioning subway system and I promise to do everything in my power to restore that confidence.”
At about 8:25 p.m. Sunday, Con Ed lost a feeder “for a short period of time,” which caused a “voltage dip” throughout the five boroughs as two power plants went offline, the governor said at a press conference Monday morning.
A total of 83 trains along the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 lines, as well as the L train, came to a temporary halt, according to the governor.