The State St. Substation in Brooklyn — the subway power room that blew up last month and stranded several trains underground for hours — will soon be back up and running, according to MTA officials.
A massive power transformer that had been meant for another dead substation was redirected this month to State St., where it is currently undergoing testing, MTA’s construction and development head Jamie Torres-Springer told the Daily News Tuesday.
As previously reported by The News, more than 3,000 riders were stranded in December when the State St. power transformer exploded under Downtown Brooklyn, cutting power to the third rail of the F and the G lines.
Roughly 12 hours later, power from other nearby substations was rerouted to cover the tracks ordinarily powered by State St.
Those adjacent facilities have been keeping the trains running for the past month — but they are also on the brink of failure, Torres-Springer said Tuesday.
The new transformer, which was delivered from a factory in North Carolina earlier this month, had initially been ordered to revive a dead substation elsewhere in the subway system. But Torres-Springer said his team decided the shaky status of the other Downtown Brooklyn power facilities meant State St. should be prioritized.
“We made a decision we had to replace it right away,” the construction boss said. “There’s a substation a couple tiers down that will get a new transformer at some point, but we’re able to live without it.”
MTA officials said the new transformer was currently undergoing testing, and should be up and running and providing power to the third rail by the end of February.
The transformer triage comes as MTA bigs are expected to travel to Albany next week to vouch for their $68 billion five-year capital budget — $3 billion of which would fund substation overhauls in the subway system.
“The State St. failure and the signal-power failures that we’ve had in the last few months, they’re really indicative of what we’ve been saying as loudly and as frequently as we can,” Torres-Springer said.
“Our system is 100 years old, a lot of it is in poor and marginal condition, and continues to decay,” he continued. “It requires further investment to continue running safe, reliable and frequent service.”