More Metro Stations Shut Down By Smoke

More Metro Stations Shut Down By Smoke

www.washingtonpost.com

Smoke poured into Metro subway tunnels again last night, a day after an unprecedented and unexplained series of such incidents, and baffled officials began to consider the possibility that the events were more than mere accidents.

"This is not normal," ... "This is highly, highly irregular."

At one point, a Metro spokeswoman said, seven trains lost power in the Blue and Yellow Line tunnels south of the Pentagon.

"We're at a loss to identify the root cause of the problem,"

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I'm not sure what is going on here but it's a strange story.

Reading into page two and three of the article it mentions that there are several fires and smoke incidents every year. I find that kind of surprising in itself. These cases over the last two days seems to be concentrated in both place and time.

Tin foil hat speculation: DC Metro air currents being "mapped" for a possible biological attack? Infrastructure contracts are up for renewal and a bidder is using "problem-reaction-solution" to drum up business?

Simply poor infrastructure construction/maintenance? Or something else?
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www.washingtonpost.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Lets just hope it's cascade failures, loss of a power line here causes a surge there making a number of knock on events.

Surprised there is no equipment installed to log events like this, I imagine all it would take is the various meters and surge protectors to either logs events themselves for physical download later, or to be hard wired to a central data base. Granted the metro network is older than that tech.

When I used to work for Thames water the main meter posts downloaded at specific times - a lot were hard wired, a lot also used GSM mobile technology (that would not work underground though) - you could get a live read from the simple LCD display or a complete graph from any given period (you could even compare it to the TV schedule and see things like half time in England matches cos of the noticeable spike in water use )