Hurricane Sandy may be months past us now, but the damage she did to our infrastructure hasn't gone anywhere. And the work that needs to be done doesn't end with the ruined South Ferry station or the Rockaway's temporary H line: there are billions of dollars of repairs to be made, and fast to get full federal funding. So, the MTA wants you to expect delays!
As Transportation Nation reports, "The MTA is in line to receive $8.8 billion in federal Sandy relief aid, which is to be split about evenly between repairs and hardening the system against future storms. Projects funded by the first $2 billion must be completed within two years after their start date." Which means that the MTA is going to need to put a whole lot of work across the subway system on the fast track, and not just on Fastrack.
And before you say that there couldn't be that much work to do since you managed to get into work this morning (good for you!), the MTA disagrees. A rep for the authority notes that since Sandy struck, the subway systems has "recorded more than 100 signal failures" that can be tracked to the storm as well as problems with switches, cables and other infrastructure. And that all needs to be fixed—preferably with federal money.
"The problem we’re going to have is how do we do that and keep the system running?" MTA interim CEO Tom Prendergast told members of the transit committee at MTA headquarters yesterday, regarding the work to be done. "We don’t want to foolishly spend money; we want to effectively spend that money in a very short period of time. So there are going to be greater outages."
The MTA doesn't have any further, more formal, announcements as to where this work will be going down exactly, or how long it will take. But better you hear this now and let it sink in then get super angry about in the coming months?
