Where There’s Smoke – Not Always a Fire
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
When it comes to subway fires, most are all smoke and no fire, transit and fire officials said yesterday.
Firefighters traipsed into the city’s subterranean transportation system 969 times last year for anything from a full-blown conflagration to a whisper of smoke in a subway tunnel, a fire department spokeswoman, Virginia Lam, said. But the vast majority of what are referred to as subway fires are actually nothing more serious than smoke conditions, Ms. Lam said.
But smoke in the air can quickly become hazardous for passengers, and smoldering material can easily turn into a flame, especially in a confined space like a subway tunnel, so the transit system is programmed to react to both.
Last week, a Manhattan-bound 7 train was stopped in its tracks for close to 90 minutes when a metal plate dislodged from the track bed and was touching the electrified third rail. The smoldering and sparking generated a thin layer of smoke that automatically caused the train’s power to shut down.
In terms of subway fires, the incident was not atypical. Most subway fires are small blazes on the track caused by sparks from the third rail that ignite nearby debris, according to the fire department’s Bureau of Fire Investigation.
Almost all other subway fires are electrical in nature, fire marshals said, ranging from a short in a fuse to the overheating of signal wires or transformers.
