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MBTA blames morning nightmare on failure of seven-mile-long National Grid power cable
By adamg on Thu, 02/15/2024 - 12:38pm
MBTA General Manager Phil Eng says the T's subway lines will be free between 3 and 7 p.m. to try to make up for this morning's three-line disaster, which he blamed on some sort of failure in a National Grid "feeder cable" supplying power to the T via North Station.
At a press conference on the Government Center Green Line platform - just as the T was announcing more Green Line delays due to a dead trolley right there - Eng said that when the cable failed, it tripped circuit breakers on the other six cables feeding power into a T substation at North Station and cutting off signals, station lights and faregates along the Green, Orange and Blue lines.
Eng, who himself was caught on a train during the outage, said T managers immediately halted all trains for safety reasons for roughly 30 minutes - as they assembled teams comprising hundreds of workers to go along the tracks and set up an ad-hoc, manual signalling system with flashlights so that trains could resume, if ever so slowly. Haymarket station was shut entirely because emergency backup lights were too dim for safety, he said.
As trolleys screeched behind him, Eng continued it took about two hours to get the signals back up and running. He praised T workers for restoring regular service in only two hours - and in operating, if ever so haltingly, service during that period.
Eng said he does not know what caused the National Grid cable to stop working, but emphasized the failure was in the line somewhere along the seven miles outside the T's control.
As he is forced to do every time he has to talk about something like this, Eng said the T is the victim of decades of deferred maintenance and that even though the fault this time was not in a system under the T's control, its engineers will be looking at ways to prevent another such failure in the future.
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Comments
Cable
This was/is confusing. At the end of the news conference, it sounded like he said the 30 year old cable was MBTA property when a reporter asked a clarifying question. This seemed to contradict his earlier statements about it being 'outside of their system.' It ultimately sounded like the failure was outside of the power station (somewhere along the 7 miles), but did in fact occur on an MBTA-owned cable that has power supplied to it via National Grid.
I also wish reporters would have grilled more about emergency lighting. The question was asked, but this seems like a major safety gap..
Agree this doesn't make sense
Here's information about the T's power system. And here's the pdf. See the diagram on page 3.
Most of the T is powered by its own 13.8 kV AC power system. This takes power from the grid (generally, although South Boston has a backup generator which can feed the system) and then converts it to 13.8 kV AC and feeds it through the system, before stepping it down at a substation to 600V DC and feeding the third rail and 480V system to powerauxiliary power needs. North Station is a junction which feeds aux power along the Green Line out towards Back Bay, with ties to the Lincoln Street Switching Station, and then also to the Berkeley Street substation (near Back Bay) which then connects to Shawmut (and back to South Boston) and then out along the Orange Line, which is also fed from Roxbury. It looks like something tripped a major portion of te 480V network, so the aux power for things like signals and lighting tripped off from North Station along the Green Line and hit the Blue and Orange lines as well, while the Red Line is fed from a different source and was mostly unscathed beyond, you know, normal Red Line things.
I am actually not an expert on this, but what I would guess happened is that something went awry at the Lincoln Street Substation feed to North Station, which tripped the feeds out to Berkeley and along the Green Line and portions of the Orange and Blue lines (the Red Line seems to be fed separately; the spider diagram and actual geography are not particularly well-aligned, but the Red Line is mostly fed by the other portion of the system). Once that tripped, it took a couple of hours to get it back online. This may have been due to something incoming from N-Grid, or that could be a red herring. N-Grid only feeds the system into South Boston and along the Red Line north of Harvard. So it could have come from South Boston to North Station via Shawmut and Berkeley.
Maybe someone else with like a degree in EE knows more about this! I'm sort of grasping at straws. Of course, so is the T.
An aside: this is why when the T claimed that it was cheaper and cleaner to de-electrify trolleybuses and then replace them with battery buses with diesel heaters they are full of it. (Their claim, which was never published publicly, was that in-motion charging buses would require more capacity, when it turns out that the existing system would have plenty.) Trolleybuses with onboard batteries can actually make the system more resilient by only drawing power when the system has capacity, and basically peak-shaving when it does. But when your agenda is to abandon zero-emission infrastructure, you just make stuff up.
It was hilarious attempting to give a press conference
In Govt Ctr right where the gl trains come shreeeeching around the corner. There’s nothing so simple that the T can figure it out.
We Gots Da Powah
Was it really such a good idea to eliminate the T's own power generating system.
Gee I know everybody loves condos on East First St. and Albany St.(where the transit authorities had plants) but what about backup power for an entire metro transit system?
Not a good look for a "world class city Mayah Woo...
You had me until you dived into the Stupid
But sure, tell me why Wu is to blame for something that happened long before she was a city councilor, let alone mayor - on a system that is run by the state, not the city.
And
That the T still runs its own power distribution system.
They just don't generate their own power (except in the case of an emergency)
Wow
Act your age.
Looking on the bright side....
Slow zones were eliminated for a little bit.
About slow zones
After noting that, hey, at least the Red Line returned to service this week and was running this morning along all its sections, Eng said the recent shutdown had eliminated all the slow zones between Park and Alewife.
Word on the street
Is that the slow zones should actually disappear tomorrow AM.
It’s never National Grid’s fault…
…. they will keep telling you that.
FTFY
It’s never MBTA’s fault…they will keep telling you that.
No, Lee was right
National Grid never takes responsibility. Like when they stopped reading my meter during the pandemic and began sending me bills based on fantastic estimates. I had to get the Utilities Commission to get them to stop.