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East Boston brush fire halts Blue Line
By adamg on Thu, 06/19/2014 - 8:31pm
Firefighters battling a brush fire off Bennington Street south of Orient Heights asked the T to shut down the Blue Line around 8:20 p.m., because the fire is close enough to the tracks they did not want to have to worry about what might happen should their streams of water hit the overhead electrical lines.
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Comments
siiiiiigh
"they did not want to have to worry about what might happen should their streams of water hit the overhead electrical lines."
Not much, because:
-tap water isn't hugely conductive
-the distance between the lines and the engines is quite long
-it's 600VDC
-You need at least 20,000V to jump one inch of air gap
-firehose streams aren't solid/continuous
So no, guys, you don't need to shut down the trains to put out the fire near the trains.
Or ...
They could be worried a high-pressure stream would take out the relatively fragile overhead wires just as a train is passing by, and then you have a train full of people stuck right next to a brush fire.
SO...
Why didn't the Blue Line offer shuttles? I sat at Aquarium for over an hour with no trains.