(Newsday posted the following article by John Valenti and Jennifer Maloney on its website on February 22.)
NEW YORK — Downed Long Island Power Authority wires are short-circuiting Long Island Rail Road operations, said acting LIRR president Ray Kenny, who added it is now his job to make officials at the power authority understand it is putting railroad operations “at risk.”
After a downed non-electrified line Tuesday night in Valley Stream disrupted service for the third time in 18 days, Kenny discussed the seriousness of the situation yesterday with LIPA president and chief executive Richard Kessel, and the two agreed more needs to be done.
“My role is to make them understand the effect these failures have on our customers and how it puts our operations and our customers at risk,” Kenny said Wednesday at the monthly meeting of the LIRR/Long Island Bus Committee at Metropolitan Transportation Authority headquarters in Manhattan.
Earlier this week, Kessel said power company crews would inspect all transmission lines along LIRR tracks to prevent lines from coming down.
After the latest incident — in which a downed “static” wire just east of the Valley Stream station disrupted service on the Far Rockaway branch for the second time in 18 days — LIPA spokesman Bert Cunningham said Kessel is “extremely concerned about what’s going on” and vowed that LIPA will do “everything we can do to escalate our inspection process.”
LIPA said statistics on downed wires were not immediately available.
Operations staff members from LIPA and the LIRR will meet this week to review the first two incidents — and to discuss immediate maintenance and prevention strategies.
The Valley Stream incident occurred Tuesday at 11:32 p.m., knocking out signals and forcing the LIRR to cancel six trains on the Far Rockaway branch before operations were fully restored at 5:32 a.m., LIRR officials said.
The inspection of transmission lines and power substations along all LIRR tracks is expected to take months to complete, Cunningham said.
He said the process started at a Valley Stream substation, but added it was unclear whether LIPA crews had inspected the stretch of track where the line fell Tuesday night.
The first of the recent fallen-wire incidents occurred Feb. 2, when a non-electrified wire dangling across seven tracks east of Valley Stream forced the LIRR to suspend service for 3 1/2 hours on the Babylon, Far Rockaway, Long Beach and West Hempstead branches. Fifty-six trains were delayed or cancelled, affecting 30,000 customers, the LIRR said. On Valentine’s Day, another non-electrified wire fell across two tracks east of the Seaford station on the Babylon line, suspending service on one track for an hour and for about 3 1/2 hours on the other. That incident affected 34 trains and about 20,000 customers.
The incident Tuesday night affected just 200 riders because of the time it occurred, LIRR spokesman James Castle said.