LIRR says Jamaica electrical fire cost about $2M

The electrical fire that brought down the Long Island Rail Road's switching system at Jamaica last month and caused a week of train delays and cancellations for tens of thousands of riders cost the LIRR about $2 million, according to the agency's preliminary findings.

An LIRR report, expected to be released Monday at a meeting of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's railroad committee, explains that the railroad spent about $1.1 million in labor and related costs, such as overtime for workers, replacement parts and the expense of having buses replace trains in some areas. The incident and its fallout cost the LIRR another $872,000 in fare revenue, which was down 21 percent during that week, the report says.

The Aug. 23 fire fried hundreds of wires in the century-old Hall Tower switching station at the busy Jamaica transit hub, a crucial connection for 10 of the LIRR's 11 lines. The fire caused a virtual shutdown of the nation's largest commuter railroad for four hours that day, and forced the agency to run limited service for nearly a full week while crews worked around the clock to repair the system. The antiquated switching equipment is scheduled to be replaced by a computer-based system in November.

While tests to electrical cables still are being run to determine an official cause of the fire, an investigation by outside consulting firm HNTB, based in Kansas City, Mo., lays out a likely scenario.

The consulting firm found that a 98-year-old concrete conduit surrounding a 750-volt third-rail power cable had degraded because of thawing and refreezing during the winter and the effects of chemical de-icers. The cable, which is two feet underground, was submerged in water during a heavy rainstorm. Through a phenomenon known as arcing, in which chemical-laden water is a conductor, electricity from the cable jumped to a nearby galvanized steel pipe, which once was used to carry compressed air that moves track switches.

The electricity heated the steel pipe, causing it to melt the insulation on an adjacent signal wire. A surge from the third rail of electricity ran through that exposed signal wire, which fed into the complex network of wires in Hall Tower, causing a short circuit, according to the consultant's findings.

An underlying cause of Aug. 23 fire is the chronic drainage problems at Jamaica Station, LIRR officials said. That means utility cables must be buried closer to each other than is typical at ground-level stations, they said.

LIRR president Helena Williams said the agency has taken a number of steps to prevent a reoccurrence, including inspecting underground cables at Jamaica, adding insulation to them and replacing them as needed. The LIRR has replaced eight such cables as part of its inspection.

Peter Haynes, president of the LIRR Commuters Campaign, said it is important that the LIRR take aggressive preventive measures going forward because past efforts were "clearly inadequate." "If there wasn't a maintenance program to be able to detect these problems, there certainly should have been," said Haynes, a former systems engineer for the LIRR. "At the least there should have been a way to detect if there was water in the concrete conduits, because that's a very bad situation - a potentially critical situation."

As part of a large renovation project at Jamaica, the LIRR had plans to reconfigure the underground utilities. That work is part of the LIRR's five-year capital plan but is currently unfunded.