The Quadrangle

Issue date: 2/2/05 Section: News

After a similar situation in March 1999, the MTA was urged to protect the control rooms from further fires, but they have yet to make any widespread changes, with only 40 of the 200 rooms outfitted with smoke detectors and fire-retardant material. The rooms that are not protected remain to be highly vulnerable to damage, and as the recent events have shown, such fires are not only costly, but cause many problems for commuters. There are many rooms just like the one destroyed at Chambers Street scattered throughout the system, which are kept locked. In order to get in, firefighters had to remove bolts holding the door shut before they could do anything to stop the blaze. Although this effort does help to keep intruders out of the room, it obviously does little in the way of fire prevention. In order to better understand what happened and how to prevent it, Peter S. Kalikow, the chairman of MTA has hired an engineering consultant, along with the inspections that the MTA will conduct itself.

Another goal is to develop a no-tolerance policy for those who enter tracks, tunnels, or other MTA property unlawfully. Installing surveillance equipment in the stations is one idea to prevent people from entering the tracks and thus helping to prevent fires. The chairman of the association's committee on passenger rail systems and a vice president at Parsons Brinckerhoff, an engineering firm based in Manhattan, William D. Kennedy, said, "There's an old saying that it's better to minimize the hazard rather than to maximize the protection."

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