Torrential Rain Floods the Subway, Causing Power Outages and Delays
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Torrential rains flooded parts of the subway yesterday, causing two power outages, backing up drains on track beds, and temporarily shutting down eight subway lines.
The effects of the deluge that deposited more than 3.3 inches of rain by 6 p.m. yesterday were similar to what happened on September 8 of last year, when 3.77 inches of rain fell, most of it during the morning rush.
Although the rains yesterday did not wreak the same widespread havoc as a year earlier, for riders of the C, E, J, Z, and nos. 1, 3, 5, and 6 trains, the similarities were hard to miss: overcrowded platforms filled with sopping commuters who waited for trains without the benefit of any announcements that the trains were running sporadically.
The rain that has fallen for six straight days has transformed the drought of last month, the fourth driest September on record, to the floods of October, which is on track to be the wettest one on record, according to the National Weather Service. On Saturday,4.62 inches of rain was measured in Central Park, the city’s largest accumulation since January 2004.
“We’re going essentially from drought to flood,” a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, Gary Conte, said.
A Con Edison electric cable in the Eastchester section of the Bronx failed yesterday at just after 9 a.m., cutting off power to 1,644 customers, including New York City Transit. As a result, riders on the no. 5 line had their service disrupted for nearly two hours.
A spokesman for Con Edison, Alfonso Quiroz, said the cause was still under investigation, but that “it was most likely due to the weather.”
Also in the morning, transit authorities re-routed local trains to express tracks on the C and E lines between 59th and Canal streets and on the no. 6 line between 42nd and Canal streets as water levels on track beds rose toward the electrified third rail.
A spokesman for New York City Transit, Charles Seaton, said it was “a possibility that track flooding was caused by clogged drains.”
Drains on track beds clogged by debris washed in by rushing waters led to many of the delays last year, when service on nearly half of the subways 25 lines was disrupted, but Mr. Seaton said yesterday’s flooding was “all relatively minor. We did not run into the problems we ran into last September.”
At about 1:10 p.m., with the rain still coming down steadily, power went out on the Williamsburg Bridge, halting service between Marcy Avenue and Broad Street for more than an hour on the J and Z lines. Mr. Seaton said the cause was still being investigated. During the evening rush, the transit authority temporarily suspended portions of the nos. 1 and 3 lines due to a “water condition.”
That shift in weather is taxing the 758 pumps located in 287 pump plants across the underground system. Most of the pumps operate behind locked doors off subway platforms.
Even on the clearest of days, each pump extracts an average of 600 gallons of water a minute from the subway system and sends it into the city’s sewer drains just to keep the water table, which is higher than the subways, and underground streams from flooding the tracks. Forty-three deep well pumps dedicated to keeping the water table low push about 1,000 gallons of water a minute out of the subway.
“Whenever you get heavy rains the flow of water increases, I know that,” the general superintendent of infrastructure for New York City Transit, Joseph Joyce, said during a recent tour of one of the system’s pump plants. “If a pump shuts down, in 20 minutes the track will be flooded.”
New York City Transit reported no problems with pumps yesterday, just the possibility of blocked drains on track beds.