NEW YORK (WCBS 880) -- The MTA revealed that a faulty fan caused security camera feeds to fail during last month’s mass shooting at a Brooklyn subway station.
MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber disclosed the cause in a letter late Monday to members of Congress, who last week demanded answers in a letter of their own to the transit agency, the New York Post reported.
Camera feeds malfunctioned at three subway stations around the time of the shooting on the morning of April 12—the 36th Street station in Sunset Park, where the shooting occurred, as well as the two adjacent stations at 25th Street and 45th Street.
It's unclear exactly how problems with the fan unit led to the camera glitch.
Efforts to fix the fan had been underway since April 7, and the surveillance feed was still operational on April 11, according to Lieber’s letter.
“Technicians replaced the fan unit on the morning of April 8, but the network diagnostics still indicated a problem,” Lieber wrote.
“MTA technicians made a series of repairs in an effort to correct the issue, and on the morning of Monday April 11, as technicians were installing new communication hardware, the camera failed,” Lieber continued.
Technicians were even working at the station when gunfire erupted on an arriving N train in a shooting that left 10 people shot and 19 others with various injuries, Lieber said.
The technicians left the station during the NYPD’s investigation, but MTA “networking specialists” worked on the equipment offsite. Lieber said it was reinstalled and working again “by 12:30 p.m. on April 13.”
Lieber hinted at the cause last month, saying that the cameras themselves were working and that it was “the internet connection that apparently had failed.”
“Without getting too technical, there’s a node that carries that internet connection for those stations that had failed,” Lieber said at the time.
The MTA and NYPD have been adamant that the failure did not hinder their search for the suspected gunman, 62-year-old Frank James, who was captured in the East Village after a 29-hour manhunt and charged with a federal terrorism offense that applies to attacks on mass transit systems.
“It did not hamper the investigation,” Lieber said last month amid reports of the malfunction. He noted that there are 600 cameras on the N line in Brooklyn and that 36 separate camera feeds were given to police to help nab the suspect. “On many of those, we had several images of the suspect,” Lieber said.
Nevertheless, Bronx Rep. Ritchie Torres, who is vice chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, led a bipartisan letter to the MTA expressing concern and asking how much the agency spends on its cameras and how it cares for them.
And acting MTA Inspector General Elizabeth Keating announced last week that watchdog had launched an investigation into the camera failure.
“As the horrific mass shooting two weeks ago in Sunset Park has raised questions about the MTA camera system, the Office of the Inspector General has initiated an inquiry into why the cameras were not transmitting on April 12 and a review of the maintenance and repair program for the critical equipment,” Keating said in a statement announcing the probe.
About 10,000 cameras dot every one of the city’s 472 subway stations.
In his letter to Torres and Reps. John Katko and Bennie Thompson, Lieber noted, “On any given day, we have approximately 99 [percent] availability of our subway station security cameras.”
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