The Serious Problem of Saltwater in the Subway System

WSJ reports:

The subway system is "in jeopardy," MTA Chairman Joseph Lhota said Monday. "Our subway system and salt water do not mix."

Salt can eat at motors, metal fasteners and the electronic parts, some many decades old, that keep the system running. Salt water, and the deposits it leaves behind, degrades the relays that run the signal system, preventing train collisions. Salt water also conducts electricity, which can exacerbate damage to signals if the system isn't powered down before a flood.

The MTA closed down its entire regional network of rails and buses on Sunday evening and expected it will remain dark at least until Wednesday morning.

Agency officials couldn't say how quickly the subway could be brought back into operation, but Mr. Lhota said in an interview that the flooding above ground appeared "serious."

The speed of recovery would depend on how badly floodwaters damaged the 14 subway tunnels under the Harlem and East Rivers, where the system is most exposed to catastrophic flooding.

Klaus Jacob, a research scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, wrote in a report last year that it could take as long as 29 days to pump out a full inundation of the tunnels.

The system already copes with a tremendous amount of groundwater and runoff, especially at stations at the tip of Manhattan, where the water table has risen in recent years. Even on a dry day, the MTA's 300 pumping rooms remove an estimated 13 million gallons of water from the tunnel network, just to keep the system dry enough to run.

Pumping water out of flooded tunnels would take anywhere from 14 hours to four days, MTA officials said.

And that task would be followed by even more painstaking work—evaluating damage, then cleaning and repairing or replacing the electronic signal arrays that line every inch of the subway tracks, and which are essential to running the system's trains.

"You can't order a part from Westinghouse or General Electric GE -0.71% that is 100 years old," Mr. Jacob said. MTA workers will have to clean and test flooded equipment, "then you cross your fingers and hope that it works," he said.

It was a long time ago, but the subways were once private. If they had stayed private they wouldn't be in the poor shape they are in today. Mayor after mayor failed to spend the money that a private firm would have spent to keep the subway in tip top shape, now it is a rat infested mess. Think about that New Yorkers when you have to walk three hours to work while the City tries to find replacement parts for 100 year old equipment.