A fire and subsequent damage to a Metro tunnel near McPherson Square limited access to several stations and delayed tens of thousands of people on Monday. If Metro employees had communicated with each other more clearly and the agency had updated playbooks for how to handle significant single-tracking through downtown, the day would have been far less chaotic.

Average effective headways on the Orange line for March 14. Graphic from MetroHero.

A fire in the tunnel outside of McPherson Square station caused significant damage to some of the train power equipment, reminiscent of the L’Enfant Plaza fire incident that killed one person and injured tens more in January of last year.

The fire caused the Orange and Blue lines to single-track through the downtown stations for the entire day, and led to Silver line trains only running to Ballston. Having only one track open from Foggy Bottom to Smithsonian station caused reported delays of up to one hour for thousands, helped lead to over 4x surge pricing on Uber, and packed buses for those trying to get to work.

Communication broke down on Monday

Confusion seemed to rule the day, especially between the rail operations control center and train operators. Around 7 am, instructions that came only minutes apart had east-bound trains skipping stations before dispatchers decided on having west-bound trains skip other stations instead.

I overheard radio traffic on the Orange/Blue lines where similar things were happening for a handful of trains coming from Franconia as they were transferred off from one train controller to another. At one point a train operator told to offload at Arlington Cemetery questioned the Orange/Silver/Blue controller whether the message was meant for a colleague because he had already been offloaded a station earlier, at Pentagon.

At least two times during the day Metro, personnel made announcements that Orange/Silver/Blue line trains would be running every 12 minutes instead of the Orange and Silver’s usual six, though there was never a MetroAlert or tweet about the change. When Metro did communicate, it wasn’t always the most clear, and it indicated service had fully resumed when it really hadn’t.

On the Silver line, several train operators were unsure of where they would need to be turning around once they got the order to reverse trains back towards Wiehle at Ballston. And at least a handful of Silver line trains continued on to Virginia Square instead of turning back as instructed.

Part of the rail control center’s plan for the day included turning around trains in the reverse direction when several got backed up - like at Rosslyn heading into DC, or at Eastern Market towards Virginia when entering the single-tracking area. These train offloads led to pretty significant crowding at some stations, which the Federal Transit Administration has noted is a safety issue.

The boss was on the scene, but rail operators didn’t try alternate train routings

Metro General Manager Paul Wiedefeld was trackside at McPherson Square station before 8:30 in the morning to check out the damage caused by the fire, something we haven’t seen in a number of years. He later gave several fairly honest interviews providing information about what happened, and released the service plan for Monday evening attached to an apology.

Not everybody appeared to be upset with Metro’s handling of the fire incident, and that may be due in part to Mr. Wiedefeld. Metro Transit PD officers were on many station platforms helping the rail division handle crowds, and station managers, rail supervisors, and more were attempting to do what they could on the platforms.

While trains single-tracked during the day in the incident area and some stations were skipped in one direction or the other, the operations control center didn’t try out any alternate options, which could have included setting up a shuttle train or having a subset of trains skipping certain stops.

The method of sending four trains through the single-tracking area on Monday led to trains running on the Orange line on average every 20 minutes throughout the day, three times slower than trains would otherwise run during rush hour.

Preparation is key

One of the key messages WMATA needs to learn from Monday is that, for better or worse, it needs to be prepared for this kind of thing to happen again. Rail operations central control needs to be able to appoint an incident commander (or put someone in charge in some other way) and issue instructions for how service will operate based on the conditions. That information then needs to be reliably passed down to controllers, train operators, police, station managers, and, most importantly to the public.

Reliable, timely information is critical in a situation like this so people can find alternate methods of transportation and so that those that don’t have any know they’ll need to spend extra time getting to wherever they need to be.

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Tagged: dc, mcpherson square, metro, metro safety, transit, wmata

Stephen Repetski is a Virginia native and has lived in the Fairfax area for over 20 years. He has a BS in Applied Networking and Systems Administration from Rochester Institute of Technology and works in Information Technology. Learning about, discussing, and analyzing transit (especially planes and trains) is a hobby he enjoys.