Metro has had employees monitoring a piece of crucial electrical equipment 24 hours a day, every single day, since a Jan. 26 failure knocked out the agency’s communications system.
And the agency plans to continue having someone monitoring it at all times until a final fix is made later this month, according to the transit agency. That’s 102 days so far and counting.
But Metro’s chief spokesman said the special monitoring has not cost the agency any extra money as workers already staff the facility where the equipment is located around the clock.
“It is not as though they are sitting on a stool waiting for the lights to go out,” said Metro spokesman Dan Stessel. “They are performing other maintenance activities within the electrical area.”
The equipment in question is called an uninterrupted power supply device that is supposed to prevent power outages.
The agency has a backup power source, in addition to the primary power system, but a problem affected the layer of redundancy in between the two systems just before midnight on Jan. 26. A “partial power outage” knocked out computer systems and radios for bus and train control centers.
Making matters worse: The agency was already performing track work that forced trains to share a single track on multiple parts of the rail system.
That brought trains to a halt as operators lost communications with the operations center. Train operators did not know when it was safe to move forward with their radios dead.
Additionally, riders faced an information blackout. The e-alerts that warn riders of delays, the website and the electronic passenger information boards at stations all went down, too. Riders were left on stopped trains — or platforms — without information about what was happening.
