The MTA shared its preliminary findings on Wednesday, Sept. 1, of its investigation into the recent power outage which caused widespread subway service disruption on Sunday evening, Aug. 29, with half of the subway network impacted, including subways lines 1 through 7, as well as the LIRR.

 

Newly appointed New York State Gov. Kathy Hochul provided a brief overview of the situation, which she described as an unprecedented system breakdown, on Monday morning at a press briefing. The service disruption which caused substantial panic among New York City commuters, as reported by various news outlets. She said 83 trains had been impacted and two organized evacuations took place from tunnels where trains had stopped mid-journey.

 

“What we experienced was a lot of anxiety for the citizens of the City who happened to be on the trains, in particular those that were between stations,” Hochul said. “This was a scary situation and one that we don’t want New Yorkers to ever have to experience again.”

 

According to the MTA officials, immediately after Con Edison experienced what was described as “a power anomaly” at 8:25 p.m. on Aug. 29, power was temporarily interrupted at certain subway signals and communications, and the default battery-powered back-up system was engaged to keep the subway system fully operational.

 

Agency officials said two back-up emergency generators, designed to kick in automatically when they sense a loss of power across the system should have activated and taken over from the initial, temporary battery power source but that did not occur.

 

They explained that an alert system that should have informed subway management of the power outage failed to trigger alerts. This meant the management team believed that systems were operating properly, when in fact the temporary battery power source only continued to power the system for approximately 45 minutes.

 

At 9:14 p.m. the batteries, which are not designed to provide long-term power, ran out causing the major service interruption.
According to the MTA, HDR is one of two engineering firms that will conduct an independent review of the incident, and will make recommendations for any systemic changes to minimize the likelihood of the incident happening again.

 

Officials said the system is also designed to return to Con Edison power when it becomes available.