Hellish NYC Commutes Reveal Aging Wires Are No Match for Extreme Heat

(Bloomberg) — Laura Sigman and Diane Laura, marketing executives at a financial services company in midtown Manhattan, have often found their office chitchat this summer turning to the subject of their hellish commutes.

Most Read from Bloomberg

As scorching weather helped trigger power disruptions that touched off massive delays in rail service last month, it took Sigman three hours by subway, bus and Uber to get from work to her home in Asbury Park, New Jersey — a journey that would typically take a fraction of the time if NJ Transit trains were running as normal. Laura spent hours sweating on stifling subway platforms and walking to alternate stations to reach Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, usually about 40 minutes away.

Their commuting woes weren’t a one-time inconvenience. Recurring transit meltdowns have plagued Manhattan-area travelers this summer, pointing to a bleak conclusion: Greater New York City’s wires weren’t built to withstand extreme heat.

“New York City infrastructure is one of the oldest in the US,” and power lines and other equipment can be vulnerable to heat because they’re nearing the end of their lifespan, said Mona Hemmati, a civil engineer and postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University’s climate school. “We need to think about more frequent inspection and adopting monitoring efforts to prevent accidents and ways to make them more resilient to rising temperatures.”

Hemmati knows about the city’s aging wires and train equipment firsthand: She almost passed out in July when the air conditioning in her subway car stopped working. AC failures have happened repeatedly this summer in the subways and on commuter rail, with a power loss trapping NJ Transit passengers in a tunnel under the Hudson River for hours last week. The cause of the outage is being investigated.

The transit snags in the New York metropolitan area — the biggest US transportation hub — are a microcosm of the risks cities around the world face as record temperatures strain power grids built for a 20th-century climate. Shielding electrical systems against blistering conditions will require multibillion-dollar investments, money that many governments don’t have or can’t spend without political consensus. As global warming intensifies, it will bring crucial infrastructure to the brink of collapse and beyond.

Story continues

NJ Transit and Amtrak have sometimes given conflicting accounts of what caused this summer’s delays. In at least once instance, NJ Transit blamed “Amtrak overhead wires,” while Amtrak countered that the train’s equipment was faulty.

Trains running under the Hudson River from New Jersey to New York have to pass through a single tunnel connecting the two states, creating a chokepoint. Like other parts of Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor from Boston to Washington, the North River Tunnel, which handles roughly 200,000 passenger trips each day, relies on a network of overhead power lines.

Some wires in the Northeast Corridor were installed as far back as the 1930s and 1940s. In hot weather, they can sag and get pulled down by passing trains, knocking out electricity and creating the stuff of transit nightmares.

In June, government-controlled Amtrak received final approval for federal funding toward a $16 billion plan that will involve building a new Hudson River tunnel and rehabilitating the existing one. But the work isn’t scheduled to be complete until 2038.

Searing conditions can cause problems outside the North River Tunnel, too. High temperatures can affect bridges, diesel engines and climate-control systems, sometimes prompting Amtrak and other railroads to operate trains at lower speeds. Heat can also snarl road traffic: Last month, the Third Avenue Bridge, which connects the Bronx to Manhattan, got stuck in an open position for hours on a particularly hot day.

Climate Risks

Amtrak is “actively identifying and prioritizing climate change risks — to see where they are changing most rapidly across our network — and defining steps to manage the impact,” an Amtrak representative said in an email. The company said there remains a “significant need to fund track and other basic infrastructure due to decades of underinvestment.”

NJ Transit, which uses Amtrak’s North River Tunnel to shuttle passengers to and from Manhattan’s Penn Station, said in an emailed response to questions that about 40 commuter trains were canceled or combined over a few days in mid-July. Amtrak says heat could have contributed to its disruptions but was not the primary cause. Public Service Electric & Gas Co., which provides power to NJ Transit, declined to comment. In late June, Amtrak and NJ Transit officials pledged to work together to investigate and resolve the infrastructure failures.

But their promises come as the largest transit agencies across the Northeast scrounge for extra cash. NJ Transit rolled out steep fare hikes in July after sounding alarms on its $107 million deficit. New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s pause on a congestion pricing plan left the Metropolitan Transportation Authority — which oversees New York City’s subways, the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad — without a crucial funding source, prompting the system to defer $16.5 billion of much-needed infrastructure upgrades.

And the subways haven’t been immune to snags this summer. As temperatures rose into the high 90s F (30s C) last month, power outages from a malfunctioning transformer resulted in delays on several lines. While the MTA says the problem wasn’t heat-related, it nonetheless left commuters to languish on scalding platforms. Aging trains, meanwhile, have left some cars without air conditioning.

Although the system dodged any heat-driven power outages this summer, the MTA is “definitely bracing” for any issues as the globe continues to warm, Jamie Torres-Springer, the MTA’s president of construction and development, said in an interview.

Power is sent to the trains through either the third rail or overhead wires. In between those are the substations, which convert the electricity into different voltages.

“Those substations are vulnerable to high heat conditions,” he said, noting that about 570 of the substation components in the MTA system are on average 50 years old. “If they overheat, then the substation stops working and you get power outages.”

Baking Wires

Con Edison, which runs the city’s main power grid, said its 95,000 miles of underground wiring have made the utility 10 times more reliable versus the nationwide average. But in sizzling weather, the buried cables bake under layers of asphalt, making them vulnerable to localized failures, Patrick McHugh, Con Edison’s senior vice president of electric operations, said in an interview. Overhead wires may be less likely to overheat, he said.

The utility is spending $2.3 billion to shore up its grid against the heat and to transition to clean energy. It’s replaced almost all of the 50-year-old paper-insulated lead covered cables from its backbone system and is working to do the same for the secondary system that feeds homes and streetlights.

But outages still happen, like the one that affected customers in Harlem in mid-July. Kaisha Huguley, an actor who lives in East Harlem, had to take the stairs to her eighth- floor apartment during one power failure after the elevator stopped working, she said in an interview. She filmed her weary climb on TikTok and people responded to her with similar stories.

“It was irritating,” said Huguley. “But I worry for people who actually don’t have the ability to move and need an elevator, like if someone were to be disabled or had broken their ankle.”

For some residents of New York City and surrounding areas, the heat-driven disruptions have been severe enough to prompt them to consider moving. Sigman, the marketing executive, is throwing in the towel and moving to Hoboken — in large part to avoid NJ Transit, which she said is unreliable year-round.

“The overall commuter experience becomes worse in the heat,” she said. “But the infrastructure issues were always there and the heat is making a convenient storyline.”

Listen on Zero: How to Upgrade the World’s Biggest Machine

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek

©2024 Bloomberg L.P.