A correction has been added to this story.
HOPING TO WIN back some passenger goodwill after a cable failure triggered massive disruptions to the Thursday morning commute, MBTA officials will turn to a playbook they have not deployed in nearly a decade: temporarily offering free rides.
T stations opened fare gates on all four major subway lines for the evening rush hour Thursday as a sort of apology to riders who earlier that day faced delays and darkened platforms when power problems rolled across the Blue, Green and Orange Lines.
The MBTA sometimes provides free travel on holidays like New Year’s Eve, but an agency spokesperson said Thursday’s maneuver is the first time the T has offered no-cost rides in response to service disruptions since the spring of 2015, right after that year’s bruising winter.
“Knowing the impacts that we caused to their travels today, we will be opening our fare 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,” MBTA General Manager Phil Eng told reporters Thursday afternoon.
The problems erupted Thursday morning around 6:30 a.m. when a substation at North Station lost power.
Eng said the preliminary investigation identified a “feeder cable” as a likely culprit. The cable, one of seven connected to the substation, failed. That in turn tripped circuit breakers as a failsafe to prevent a more significant disruption.
The MBTA owns the roughly 30-year-old feeder cable. Eng said it appears that whatever happened to cause it to fail — which officials still have not described — occurred away from the substation, somewhere else along its seven-mile length underneath Boston. [CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story said the electricity was supplied by National Grid., but National Grid says it does not supply electricity in that area.]
“Many different causes could have happened, regardless of our ability to maintain our system,” Eng said. “We don’t know the actual cause of that, so I think it would be unfair for me to speculate on what caused it. Those types of things happen, and I don’t know what kind of activities were happening across all of the areas above our feeder cable.”
When the circuit breakers tripped, sections of the Blue, Orange and Green Line lost AC power, which affected signals, stations and public address systems but not train traction power.
Eng said the T held trains for 15 to 30 minutes immediately after the outages so officials could confirm train locations and ensure they did not “put any of our riders, our employees, in harm’s way.”
The MBTA then sent hundreds of workers out onto the system to manually direct the movement of trains, which Eng said was a safe but slower alternative.
Emergency-powered lights turned on in some stations, but that appeared to fail in other locations. WCVB posted video just before 8 a.m. of an almost completely darkened Haymarket Station.
Eng said officials decided to skip Green Line stops at Haymarket temporarily “because we didn’t think it was bright enough.”
By about 10:45 a.m., the T had fully restored power to all three affected lines and resumed regular service. Eng said he does not foresee any lingering effects on the evening commute.
“Right now, we’re running back where we should be. Riders should expect that this afternoon’s travel should be the way we had anticipated this morning to go,” Eng said shortly after 12 p.m. “We fully anticipate that it will be a smoother ride.”
The upheaval Thursday was the latest to plague MBTA riders, who for years have endured unreliable service, patches of slower-than-normal travel and safety issues. Eng, who like Gov. Maura Healey has criticized previous years of underinvestment in the system, on Thursday pointed to an ongoing campaign to eliminate slow zones by the end of 2024 and said his team has been “working hard to improve communication.”
Kate Dineen, president of the business-backed A Better City group, said the incident on Thursday “reaffirms the urgent need to ensure that the MBTA has adequate resources to address the system’s nearly $25 billion state of good repair backlog,” referencing the new estimate of maintenance needs T officials produced in the fall.
“According to the MBTA, approximately 76 percent of its power assets were out of a state of good repair as of July 1, 2021. The MBTA has suffered from decades of underinvestment and is in need of near-term capital and operating funds, new procurement tools, and a longer-term financing plan to get the system back on track,” Dineen said in a statement. “We appreciate General Manager Eng’s transparency, as well as his decision to suspend fare collection across all subway lines during this evening’s commute.”
Eng faced a commuting disruption of his own Thursday: he arrived a few minutes late to the press conference his team scheduled because his Green Line train was stuck behind another disabled train.
Asked whether he felt any personal frustrations about the delay, Eng said disruptions allow him to “experience the same things that the riders are experiencing.”
“While we were waiting, I had a chance to talk with many of the riders on there. There were announcements being made on the train, so we were aware that there was a situation,” he said. “It’s part of riding the T, but we’re going to make those situations fewer and further apart, because reliability, safety and communication is going to be part of us moving forward.”