MBTA offers free subway rides to apologize for power outage on Green, Blue and Orange lines
BOSTON - The MBTA is offering free subway rides to frustrated commuters in Boston Thursday evening as an apology for a power outage that brought the morning rush hour to a crawl for thousands on the Green, Blue and Orange lines.
MBTA General Manager Philip Eng said the issues started around 6:50 a.m. when a substation at North Station lost power. That affected the signals on the Green, Blue and Orange lines and T workers had to take manual control of the trains, stopping many of them.
Furious riders vented their frustrations on social media. One woman said Oak Grove on the Orange Line was "complete chaos." Others warned commuters that the platforms and trains were packed with riders. One rider said trains were so slow that it took more than an hour-and-a-half for the short ride from Melrose to Boston.
"Knowing the impact that we caused to their travels today, we will be opening the fair gates on the subways this afternoon from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. as a gesture to acknowledge that we do care about their travels, we do appreciate that they're riding the T and our riders are paramount to us," Eng told reporters at a noon news conference at Government Center.
He said the T traced the power issue to one of seven main feeder cables at North Station. That one cable failed and that failure affected the other six.
"As a safe-fail operation to ensure that there's nothing more significant happening, all of the circuit breakers tripped to assure safety. That's why we had impacts across the three different lines," Eng told reporters.
The general manager said the cable was "outside the MBTA's internal infrastructure" and they're still trying to figure out why it failed.
Eng said the entire outage lasted about two hours and there were no incidents with riders or T workers.
By 9:20 a.m. the MBTA said power had been restored on the Green and Blue lines. The Orange line was completely restored around 10:40 a.m.
Orange Line riders were allowed to take Commuter Rail trains for free at Oak Grove, Malden Center, North Station, Back Bay, Ruggles, and Forest Hills during the outage. Blue Line passengers used the Silver Line bus for service from Airport to South Station. There was no alternate service for Green Line riders.
Check the MBTA's alert page for the latest service updates.
