Metro plans to spend $14 million to replace 37-year-old equipment and install backup systems after a failure on Wednesday knocked out the transit system’s communications for much of the day, including its Web site, public address system and customer service complaint line.
But the replacement equipment could take as long as six months to install, and agency officials said Thursday they couldn’t guarantee that more problems were not going to occur in the meantime as they depended on the old, jury-rigged equipment.
“We’re monitoring it on an hourly basis, a daily basis,” General Manager John Catoe said.
The failure highlighted the growing list of costly repairs the cash-strapped agency needs to keep the system running. It also spooked officials and riders about the vulnerability of the system.
“I always thought we had this backup system type of capability,” said Peter Benjamin, a board member and Metro’s former chief financial officer. “Apparently this is not the case.”
Wednesday’s 2:45 a.m. outage did not affect the operations of the transit system, though. “It was not a safety issue, it was a communications issue,” Catoe said.
The outage was caused by a failure of one of two pieces of equipment that distribute power throughout the system, Chief Information Officer Suzanne Peck said. The pieces date to 1972, making them nearly twice as old as their 20-year life span. A circuit breaker failed in one, Peck said, causing it to burn up to 30,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
The meltdown did not affect an adjacent unit of the same age that powers the transit agency’s most vital operations — its train oversight tools. But Metro officials said that system has extra layers of redundancy should it break, including an off-site train control center under construction.
The agency was able to patch together the zapped unit and restore all systems by 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, Peck said. Crews were fixing another old unit — which was out of service because of an earlier failure — to function as a backup until new equipment arrives.
Replacing the three old power distributors would cost about $2 million, and the other improvements would cost an additional $12 million, Peck said. To make the fix, the agency will need to push other projects down the agency’s $11 billion list of infrastructure needs.
