A power failure stopped trains on every line in the city subway system at the same time during the Wednesday-morning rush hour — and transit advocates fear it could happen again.
Con Ed blamed the outage on two high-tension electric feeders that malfunctioned in The Bronx around 9:30 a.m., causing a voltage reduction that spread across the city.
Trains were stuck in place for about six minutes — although the cars never lost power.
But they could not move because the emergency brakes were activated when all the signals were knocked out.
Bill Henderson, executive director of the New York City Transit Riders Council, worried about the system’s vulnerability given how the outage affected the entire system.
“It’s an issue,” he said. “It’s largely an inconvenience rather than a disaster, but to the degree that there is a threat of losing control of the system, you obviously want to build safeguards into the signal system so you can maintain control rather than shutting everything down.
“Signalization is an area that the MTA is looking to improve. That’s a big source of delays.”
Both the MTA and Con Edison were investigating why the feeders failed — and hoped to have answers this week.
“Right now we are investigating to find out what happened and to what extent,” said Con Edison spokesman Phil O’Brien, noting that the utility believes the affected equipment is somewhere in the area of the northern Bronx near the Westchester County line.
“When electrical problems such as this occur, it’s usually because there is a high demand [for power], especially during hot days,” O’Brien said.
“But it wasn’t that hot today, so it seems unlikely that it would have been the heat.”
Richard Barone, director of transportation programs at the Regional Plan Association, worried about the aging system.
“Our infrastructure is old — both subway and power,” he said.
“The rolling stock is in great shape, but there are some parts of the system that are still weak, like power structures and signals,” he added. “The next step should be to somehow make the system more resilient and modern.”
Temperatures reached the high 80s on Wednesday, but Con Edison said the demand for electricity was nowhere near the maximum 13,675 megawatts the power grid is designed to handle.
But straphangers were left rankled by the whole ordeal.
“This is outrageous,” said Cindy Sandoval, 24. “What is going to happen when it gets hotter, when Summer is here?”
Additional reporting by Georgett Roberts