* Damage estimated at $900 million, based on Reuters review
* 24 percent of NJ Transit fleet damaged
* Key Meadows complex had never flooded
* NJ Transit says equipment loss won't have significant hit
on service
(Adds New York Post comment)
NEW YORK, Nov 17 (Reuters) - New Jersey Transit's struggle
to recover from Superstorm Sandy is being compounded by a
pre-storm decision to park much of its equipment in two rail
yards that forecasters predicted would flood, a move that
resulted in damage to one-third of its locomotives and a quarter
of its passenger cars.
That damage is likely to cost tens of millions of dollars
and take many months to repair, a Reuters examination has found.
The Garden State's commuter railway parked critical
equipment - including much of its newest and most expensive
stock - at its low-lying main rail yard in Kearny just before
the hurricane. It did so even though forecasters had released
maps showing the wetland-surrounded area likely would be under
water when Sandy's expected record storm surge hit. Other
equipment was parked at its Hoboken terminal and rail yard,
where flooding also was predicted and which has flooded before.
Among the damaged equipment: nine dual-powered locomotive
engines and 84 multi-level rail cars purchased over the past six
years at a cost of about $385 million.
"If there's a predicted 13-foot or 10-foot storm surge, you
don't leave your equipment in a low-lying area," said David
Schanoes, a railroad consultant and former deputy chief of field
operations for Metro North Railroad, a sister railway serving
New York State. "It's just basic railroading. You don't leave
your equipment where it can be damaged."
After Reuters made numerous inquiries to state and local
officials this week about the decision to store equipment in the
yards, an unidentified senior transportation official told the
New York Post that NJ Transit had launched an internal probe,
the Post reported on Saturday.
NJ Transit Chairman James S. Simpson, the state's
transportation commissioner, told Reuters on Saturday he knew of
no such investigation. NJ Transit spokesman John Durso said the
agency had not launched a probe but would examine its response
to the storm, as "is standard procedure following any major
incident."
The Post said it stood by its story.
As of Friday, almost three weeks after the storm, the agency
was still struggling to restore full service for its 136,000
daily rail commuters, running just 37 trains into New York Penn
Station during the morning rush hour, rather than its usual
63. More service will be restored on Monday. The disruptions
have caused long delays and crowded trains for Jersey residents
who work in the biggest U.S. city.
James Weinstein, NJ Transit's executive director, said he
did not expect the loss of equipment to have a significant
effect on service in the coming weeks and months.
Sandy was a storm of rare ferocity, and some damage was
inevitable. High winds and a crushing storm surge damaged every
conceivable element of the rail system.
The massive, slow-moving storm, which came ashore near
Atlantic City, sent boats crashing into a key rail bridge and
gigantic trees toppling onto wires and tracks. A rush of
seawater washed out miles of coastline track and a switch that
directs some of NJ Transit's most heavily traveled rail lines
into New York City.
Floodwaters zapped the computer system that guides trains
and alerts passengers; damaged a substation that powers much of
the agency's main artery into the city; coursed into one of the
two tunnels that funnel its trains under the Hudson River; and
left a major hub in Hoboken under nine feet of water and five
feet of mud.
Still, some of the damage could have been avoided with
better planning, railroad experts say.
YARD IN A SWAMPY CROOK
Most of the avoidable damage came at NJ Transit's Meadows
Maintenance Complex, a sprawling 78-acre network of tracks and
buildings in an industrial area of Kearny that is surrounded by
wetlands. The complex is the primary maintenance center for the
agency's locomotives and rail cars, with both outdoor and indoor
equipment storage; repair, servicing, cleaning, inspection and
training facilities; and the agency's rail operations center,
which houses computers involved in the movement of trains and
communication with passengers.
The yard sits in the swampy crook where the Passaic and
Hackensack rivers come together. Elevation maps show that it
lies between 0 and 19 feet above sea level. The National
Hurricane Center was predicting a storm surge of 6 to 11 feet
along the New Jersey and New York coast on top of an unusual
tide that already had the rivers running high.
Forecasts were that the storm would make landfall on Monday,
Oct. 29, somewhere along the New Jersey or New York coast. On
Friday, Oct. 26, executives from the New York City subway system
and all of the region's commuter rail systems - NJ Transit, Long
Island Rail Road and Metro North Railroad - decided they would
halt all service Sunday night.
NJ Transit's last trains left their originating stations at
11 p.m. on Sunday, and workers spent the next 12 hours securing
equipment, said Weinstein.
At NJ Transit's emergency command center, reports streamed
in from the governor's command center in Trenton, county
emergency management officials and the National Weather Service,
which provided frequent updates on the storm's progress.
Monitoring those reports and advising the agency on what to
expect from the storm was NJ Transit Police Capt. Robert Noble,
who is well-versed and trained in monitoring storms, Weinstein
said.
Noble said he monitored weather reports for all of the
agency's bus lots and rail yards statewide. Flooding was
predicted for virtually every corner of the system, he said.
"Based upon the information we had at that hour, the complex
was not the highest-threat location that we had," he said.
Yet a Reuters review of information disseminated before the
storm found detailed maps issued by the National Hurricane
Center and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, all warning
that both the rail hub in Hoboken and the Meadows complex in
Kearny would flood. Asked if NJ Transit executives saw those
maps and factored the predictions into their decision-making,
Weinstein said the agency considered the storm surge predictions
but also relied on history and experience.
FORECASTS PROVED HIGHLY ACCURATE
The agency has been operating its Meadows complex since the
1980s, and it had never flooded, not even during Hurricane
Floyd, which caused record flooding in New Jersey in 1999, said
Kevin O'Connor, vice president and general manager of rail
operations. Several former NJ Transit employees who worked there
for decades said they could not recall any time it had flooded.
A map of the storm surge from Hurricane Irene in August
2011, prepared by the FEMA, shows water came within about 400
yards of the rail complex. O'Connor said employees had trouble
getting to the complex during that storm because surrounding
roads had flooded, but the water never encroached on the rail
yard.
"Our experience and all of the information we had led us to
conclude that our equipment was in the safest possible place,"
Weinstein said. "There was no reason for us to think that the
kind of flooding that we actually experienced would happen
there."
But this time, the weather forecasters proved right, and
history proved wrong. Maps of the forecasters' predictions,
compared with those of the actual storm surge, show the computer
models were remarkably accurate. Tides added another 4.5 feet of
water to the storm surge in the area, said Philip Orton,
research scientist in physical oceanography and specialist in
storm surges at Stevens Institute of Technology.
Given the value of the equipment stored at the Meadows yard
during the storm, it is hard to imagine why NJ Transit
executives gambled that history would repeat itself, said Alain
Kornhauser, director of the Transportation Research Center at
Princeton University.
Weinstein said he could not yet put a dollar amount on the
damage. A Reuters review of Board of Directors meeting minutes
and news accounts describing equipment purchases found the
damaged locomotives and passenger cars worth about $900 million.
Kornhauser was especially critical that nine new dual-motor
engines, which together cost more than $107 million, had been
left in an area predicted to flood. Even if the risk of flooding
had been infinitesimal, he said, the agency's newest, most
expensive equipment should have been moved to higher ground.
"What do you do with your personal valuable assets when you
hear a hurricane is coming?" he said. "You put them in your
pocket and get out of there, don't you? You don't need to be a
rocket scientist for that one, do you?"
NJ Transit's sister railroads in New York did move their
rolling stock to higher ground on the Sunday night before the
storm.
After consulting "slosh maps," which predicted which areas
would flood, Long Island Rail Road moved hundreds of train
engines and cars from its huge Westside Yard just west of Penn
Station in New York City and other low-lying yards scattered
across its system, said Joe Calderone, the railroad's vice
president of public affairs. Much of the equipment was moved to
a large rail yard at Jamaica, Queens. What wouldn't fit in yards
deemed safe from flooding was parked on the main line and other
high-elevation tracks.
No LIRR locomotives or rail cars were damaged, Calderone
said.
None of New York City's subway cars were damaged during
Sandy. The yards at Coney Island, the largest yard in the
system, and the Rockaways were emptied before the storm, with
equipment moved to other yards or parked on lines not vulnerable
to flooding, spokesman Kevin Ortiz said.
Metro North was so concerned about the potential storm surge
on the Hudson River that it asked National Weather Service
forecasters to run computer models to predict whether certain
yards would flood. Railroad executives then used those
predictions to decide where to move equipment, said Howard
Permut, the railroad's president.
"We had direct conversations with some of the forecasters
themselves," he said. "They ran a bunch of models for that."
Some stock was exposed nevertheless. North of New York City,
in Croton-on-Hudson, the storm surge from the Hudson River
flooded Metro North's Harmon rail yard. There, workers had moved
equipment to the northernmost point of the yard in an effort to
keep it dry, said spokeswoman Marjorie Anders. Still, two
locomotives and 11 passenger cars were damaged, she said.
SALTWATER, 5 FEET DEEP
NJ Transit's Meadows yard was particularly vulnerable. The
National Hurricane Center's models from 7 a.m. on the Saturday
before the storm predicted water would lap at its edge. By 7
p.m. Sunday, some models predicted most of the yard would flood.
That night, NJ Transit began moving rail cars and locomotives
there.
By 11 a.m. Monday, scores of locomotives and hundreds of
rail cars awaited the storm in the Meadows yard.
NJ Transit has 203 locomotives and 1,162 rail cars, and 62
locomotives and 261 rail cars were damaged. That amounts to 24
percent of the fleet.
All but 15 percent or 20 percent of the damaged stock was
flooded at the Meadows yard, said Durso, the NJT spokesman. The
rest were in Hoboken, which also saw severe flooding. Durso said
he could not provide specific counts of damaged equipment by
location.
Weinstein and O'Connor were at the Meadows complex on Monday
afternoon during the storm, Weinstein said, and they remained
confident in their decision. "There was no reason for anybody to
believe that the flooding was going to be anything close to what
we experienced," he said.
By late Monday night and early Tuesday morning, it became
clear they had miscalculated.
Water had surrounded the maintenance buildings by 10 p.m.,
Durso said. By 2 a.m., water had come inside, and employees
called O'Connor to tell him about it.
The water was as deep as five feet in some of the complex's
maintenance areas, Weinstein said. Out in the yard, it was deep
enough to submerge automobiles. Salt water rose above the wheel
wells of the locomotives and rail cars, engulfing brakes,
electrical systems, heating and air-conditioning units,
batteries and traction motors that help power the cars and
soaking insulation panels and seat cushions.
Some of the equipment, Weinstein said, had already been
taken out of service for repairs before the storm. Some of the
repair work is already under way.
He said he could not yet estimate the cost or time to repair
the equipment. Metro North expects to spend more than $100,000
repairing each of its damaged rail cars, Anders said. The
Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority spent about
$1.5 million repairing one locomotive and 12 passenger cars that
flooded during Hurricane Irene, said Ron Hopkins, SEPTA's
assistant general manager for operations. The work took more
than a year.
Should NJ Transit's costs be similar, they would face a
repair bill of more than $32 million.
Weinstein said all of his attention to date has been on
restoring service, and he has not had time to reflect on lessons
learned. But both he and Governor Chris Christie say there will
be a review of the agency's response to the storm.
"You can prepare for a worst-case scenario, but the standard
of preparedness was definitely raised by this storm," said
Christie spokesman Michael Drewniak. "As we did post-Hurricane
Irene, we will be evaluating how we did and where we can
improve, and make changes for the future. But, again, this was a
hit of historic proportions."
(Additional reporting by Melanie Hicken; research by Lisa
Schwartz; Editing by Maurice Tamman and Michael Williams)