NY: Hellish NYC commutes reveal aging wires are no match for extreme heat

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.”