An electrical incident on a D.C. Metro train Monday (Jan. 12) left one person dead and reportedly over 80 others injured. D.C. Metro officials have been told the source of the train failure, although a deeper investigation has been launched.
Around 3:30 PM ET, a Northern Virginia-bound Yellow Line train left the L’Efant Plaza Metro station which is one of the system’s busiest lines. As it exited the station, it traveled around 150 feet and stopped in a tunnel. That’s when smoke began to fill some of the cars, choking passengers and causing breathing and eye problems. According to witnesses that spoke with WNEW CBS DC 99.1, the situation was frightening. One man said that people began to pray and feared for their lives vocally.
A report from The Washington Post goes into even deeper detail:
Passengers said the darkened cars quickly filled with smoke. Several riders said as much as an hour went by before firefighters arrived and led them out of the cars, escorting them back to the station. In the meantime, while the passengers waited in the smoke-filled cars, many were choking and some lost consciousness, witnesses said.
Passengers were stricken, and some were panicked.
“The power went off. The train stopped. The lights went out. And the smoke appeared,” said passenger Jason Hill, 31. “It built up fast, man, until you couldn’t see anything. Eventually it was like we were basically out of air.”
The National Transportation Safety Board announced that an “electrical arcing event” was the cause of the D.C. Metro train filling with smoke. Essentially, it involves cables within the third rail and was most likely a short circuit of some sort which often generates heavy smoke.
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Photo: Unsuck DC/Facebook
