Update: 10:45 a.m.: In addition to the power outage that brought down most of the Metro system Thursday night, the agency also had an information blackout, leaving riders metaphorically in the dark.
The outage knocked out the systems controlling the e-alerts that warn riders of delays, the website and the electronic passenger information boards at stations, Metro spokesman Dan Stessel said.
One rider said he waited for about 45 minutes at Farragut North before he heard any announcements. Even then, the radio announcement gave no information about when the trains were coming. He said he waited more than an hour before any trains passed through in either direction. When the first trains came through, he said, one ironically was the money train that collects riders’ fares.
Metro acknowledges that it did not communicate well with riders Thursday night when the power outage brought down much of the rail system. The outage, plus the scheduled single tracking, made matters worse.
“This led to some hour-long waits for customers, without the standard communication channels to explain why,” Stessel acknowledged. “Frankly, we should have been tweeting independently,” Stessel said. “And in the future, we will.”
He also said an alert system that will be started next month also will help, allowing e-alerts even if the other channels are down.
A similar outage occurred in November 2009, but it occurred during overnight hours when no passenger trains were running. Still, it freaked out officials at the time who pledged to fix the 37-year-old equipment that failed.
The latest power outage, though, occurred at the agency’s new operations control center, with a problem on the system’s uninterrupted power supply equipment, Stessel said. The agency has a backup power source, in addition to the primary power system, but the problem affected a layer of the redundancy system. It was not immediately clear how old the equipment was that failed.
Original post: Metro riders suffered another and possibly even scarier meltdown late Thursday night when the agency’s bus and rail communications system blipped out, hours after a high-profile track problem on the Red Line in the morning.
The transit agency said a “partial power outage” affected computer systems and radios for bus and train control centers just before midnight. The Yellow and Green lines were unaffected. But as a safety precaution, the system stopped trains on the Red, Orange and Blue lines for what it said was 15 minutes.
However, riders reported lengthy delays, with trains stopped in the tunnels and riders stuck waiting for trains without information. The delays were exacerbated by single tracking for already scheduled track work.
No Metro alerts were sent out about the problems. The incident comes after the board just hours earlier moved ahead with fare increases and asked how the agency could better communicate with riders during major service problems.
The fiasco capped another bad day for Metro. A cracked rail near Tenleytown during the morning commute caused major delays for about six hours, including during the busiest time of the morning commute. The crowding got so bad, another train broke down, further clogging the system.
Metro said it is still investigating the cause of Thursday’s power outage — and were still trying to determine the cause of the cracked rail.
