NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- Two power failures this week crippled seven lines and froze signals, frustrating riders, along with Gov. Kathy Hochul and the MTA.
The outages at the West 4th Street station in Greenwich Village impacted lines on both Wednesday and Thursday—all during a stifling heat wave and a monster rainstorm that caused flooding in some stations.
"For decades, the people who were in a position to do something about it failed to make the important upgrades," Hochul said Friday at a news conference with MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber.
The governor said Thursday that she had directed the MTA “to undergo a full review of this week’s issues to prevent similar outages in the future.”
“We're going to have $4 billion to upgrade aging power systems like the one at West 4th,” Hochul said, referring to the MTA’s $68.4 billion 2025-29 Capital Plan, part of the state budget.
Lieber said the city’s infrastructure is old and unreliable, and long overdue for those upgrades.
“We're talking about a 100-year-old electrical infrastructure—cloth-covered wires that are from our great grandparents’ era, and we just can't live with that anymore,” he said.
Lieber said the MTA is looking into what happened. “We had a tough week. The riders experienced it. And we have to do better.”