(Newsday posted the following article on its website on April 1.)
NEW YORK — With the nation at war with al-Qaida, the busy warren of tunnels and tracks that connects Penn Station to Queens and New Jersey is a security nightmare. Post-9/11, officials have improved their ability to detect intruders as well as chemical, biological and radioactive threats in the tunnels. But critical upgrades of ventilation, fire standpipes, escape routes and emergency communication systems are not yet complete.
Washington needs to step up its funding to speed those improvements in the two- to three-mile-long tunnels, owned by Amtrak but also used by the Long Island Rail Road and New Jersey Transit. The work will be expensive, but the alternative is intolerable. Witness the recent terrorist attack on trains in Madrid.
With 21 tracks and 16 miles of tunnels to Queens and New Jersey, Penn Station is one of the nation’s busiest. More than 750 trains and 500,000 commuters pass through the station every weekday, in addition to millions of travelers each year from Washington, D.C., and Boston.
“As a vital conduit for the Northeast Corridor, Penn Station is irreplaceable,” said Rep. Pete King (R-Seaford), who is pushing Washington for $893 million to complete the work – $700 million for Penn, the rest for tunnel improvements in the Washington-Baltimore area.
The problem is how to get large numbers of passengers safely out of the tunnels and to get emergency workers into them in a timely way, should the need arise.
There are three escape routes from the six, century-old tunnels running beneath the East and Hudson Rivers. The first, and Amtrak’s preferred approach, is to use rescue engines to pull trains from the tunnels. Railcar brakes that lock in an emergency need to be updated so that workers can free them without crawling under the cars.
Next, passengers could use recently repaired concrete “bench wall” walkways to reach tunnel exits. But that’s a long, difficult hike, particularly for the infirm or if progress is impeded by smoke, flames or worse.
The last option is four single-file spiral staircases – exiting the tunnels in Long Island City in Queens, First Avenue in Manhattan and in Weehawken, N.J. But they require a 10-story climb. And the staircases are so narrow that emergency workers couldn’t go down while passengers were coming up. Officials plan to replace them with stairs that can handle two columns of users.
In 2002, Congress chipped in $100 million for tunnel work at Penn. But at the current pace, the first phase of the work won’t be finished until 2009 and the entire job won’t be completed for years more. Record deficits have upped pressure to control federal spending. Still, some things just need to be done. This is one of them.