On the morning of Sept. 25, senior broadcast journalism major Michele Herman was on a 6 a.m. train bound from New Haven to New York’s Grand Central Station. She makes this trip three times a week for her internship in the city, but that day the train stopped in Stamford and the Metro-North took Herman and her fellow passengers off the train.
The delay was due to an electrical problem on the New Haven line, which limited service that affected one-third of its riders, according to the Metropolitan Transit Authority.
Herman waited two hours before she could board a second train to get into the city. The electrical problem affected Herman’s commute a total of five times. The MTA did not run at full service until Monday, Oct. 7.
“They told us that there were no trains coming and if they did come they were way too packed and nobody could get on them,” Herman said.
Freshman Oliwer Szymczak frequently travels on the New Haven Line to go home to Brooklyn, N.Y.
On Friday, Sept. 27, Szymczak was headed home for the weekend when his train was forced to stop in Stamford for 30 minutes due to the power failure.
“I had to wait for another train for about an hour,” he said. “When I finally got back on, there was no place to sit. I got on, and half the train was standing. It was packed.”
Despite the delay, Szymczak credited Metro North for their efforts and said “everything was on time” for his return to Quinnipiac two days later.
On Monday, Sept. 30, Con Edison took the blame for the power loss that affected commuters on Metro-North’s New Haven line. Officials believe the outage occurred once a feeder cable that became disconnected caused another feeder cable to fail, which caused the power loss.
“I think the MTA handled the situation to the best of their abilities,” Herman said. “They were trying to keep us updated, they were attempting to get as many trains out there but it just wasn’t working.”
The transportation dilemma that affected more than 125,000 commuters prompted Connecticut Governor Dannel P. Malloy to issue a statement.
“I’m happy for the thousands of Connecticut commuters that service will be back to normal on Monday,” Malloy said. “I hope this outage serves as a wake up call to both Con Ed and the MTA when it comes to maintenance. We need to look at why this happened and take steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again. And we will continue to push Con Ed to reimburse residents. Connecticut did not cause this problem, and we should not be on the hook for the cost.”
