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Straphangers endured rush-hour hell Monday morning due to multiple medical emergencies, one of which led to a mechanical malfunction that prevented express trains from running in Queens.
Trains on the E, F, M and R lines experienced hours of “major delays” as workers addressed the problems, which began at 8:47 a.m. when one rider suffered a seizure and another slipped and fell on an E train parked at 53rd Street-Lexington Ave. station in Manhattan, MTA spokesman Eugene Resnick said.
A third medical incident that occurred less than an hour later 9:38 p.m. at 67th Avenue in Queens required the MTA to utilize “an unused switch” to direct trains running on the local track to express service, Resnick said.
The MTA later clarified that the switch is used “infrequently.”
All four lines ran local until 10:59 a.m., when service resume with residual delays. Officials attributed 144 delayed trains the switch malfunction, and 69 to the three sick customers.
The hours of ensuing delays left riders furious. One rider reported boarding a Manhattan-bound E train at 10:45 a.m. and not arriving at the Roosevelt Avenue station until 12:19 p.m. Another tweeted that their door-to-door commute from Queens to Manhattan, which usually takes 45 minutes, took two hours.
“This express E took 53 minutes to crawl through one express stop from 71st Ave to Roosevelt Ave.,” one rider tweeted to the MTA. “Sorry is meaningless when this keeps happening.”
“It has been over an hour and I have traveled exactly one stop on the E line,” one woman tweeted. “You keep hiking the fare prices with nothing to show for it. ‘Sorry’ is indeed not enough, and our ‘continued patience’ is wearing pretty thin.”
“Obviously technical malfunctions happen but I just kept thinking, will the MTA allow every single mishap to derail the schedules of hundreds of people on a given day?” the woman, who identified herself as Alice F., told The Post via direct message.
“This is far from the first time that’s happened but all we get offered are half-hearted excuses and cookie-cutter apologies such as ‘thank you for your continued patience.’
“People need to get places. I was able to make up for the class time I lost, but how many people are going to get fired or written up for lateness they had no control over?”
The MTA said the switch was placed in a neutral position and will be fixed Monday night.
“Three different sick and injured passengers at about the same time caused a regrettably messy commute on Queens Boulevard lines that delayed trains and inconvenienced riders. Complicating matters was a malfunctioning switch that should have helped reroute following trains around one of the trains stopped to await medical assistance for a rider,” MTA Vice President for Subways Demetrius Crichlow said in a statement.
“From start to finish, we continued to operate service but with delays for about two hours that included the end of rush hour, and we apologize to those who were late to work.”
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