Friday Morning Hell: When WTC PATH Escalators Don't Work

[Update Below] You know what was probably missing from your Friday morning commute? Getting close with some strangers and trying to hike up the escalators at the World Trade Center PATH station. Our Dan Dickinson Tweeted, "Complete clusterfuck at the WTC PATH station this morning. Amazed no one got hurt (yet)" with the above photograph.

Others Tweeted:

@LaSpiaggia: "Stuck in WTC PATH station with no way out. Escalators turned off. Cop saying "overcrowding.""
@knorelli: "What a way to start this Friday 1000's of ppl stranded in the wtc path station"

@stevenshie: "Escalators are down in #WTC #path station. Literally thousands of ppl waiting to climb the tiny staircase. Gonna be a long wait."
@ploytang: "The hilarious moment when the escalator at WTC path station stops working during morning rush hour"

Things were not any better at the top of the escalators—the area by Hudson News was full, making it difficult for people to continue walking (and prevent pileups). Another recommended, "Escalators are down at the WTC Path. Take the ferry into the city if coming from Hoboken." This has happened before.

Update: The Port Authority explains to us that the escalators were not broken, but actually turned off for safety reasons. "There was a trespasser in a tunnel over at 9th Street," a rep explains, "so they closed the tunnel the 33rd to Journal Square line. Therefore everybody from New Jersey trying to get into New York on PATH went to the World Trade Center line and everybody in downtown New York wanting to get to New Jersey went on the World Trade Center line. Therefore there was massive crowding in the station and for safety reasons they shut down the escalators. In a post-9/11 world you don't want to take any chances." And yes, they caught the guy in the tunnel.

Contact the author of this article or email tips@gothamist.com with further questions, comments or tips.

By Jen Chung in News on January 20, 2012 9:23 AM

Comments [rss]

B

The retarded cops and Port Authority MISmanagement blocked the entry and exit of passengers from WTC station instead of allowing them to disperse or helping to guide the human traffic. Imagine if this were a real terrorist threat situation with a suicide bomber blowing himself up and taking hundreds of casualties with him after seeing this immense sea of innocent lives locked in a station with nowhere to go. All this because of foolishness and stupidity of Port authority police and the bungling managment of Port Authority officials..

Cat Scratch Fever

The next person who says "In a post-9/11 world you don't want to take any chances." will not live to see the next September 11th. That is such a pussy statement.

Perry

One more reason not to live in Jersey!

SeasTooFarToReach

Whoa. I'm glad there were no claustrophobics or anyone got an anxiety attack. Could you imagine someone freaking out and staring to push and shove people around them? Probably a stampede.

Peanut_Butter

I don't mind walking up stairs, per se, but the worst tease is when you get to a set of escalators to find it's not working.

sasquatch_steve

Obligatory Mitch Hedberg:

An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs. You should never see an Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order sign, just Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience.

sasquatch_steve

That's what you get for living in Jersey.

bigtimegeek

Jersey City and Hoboken are way nicer than any of the non-Manhattan boroughs, so STFU. No one wants to hear your weak, pretentious jabs at NJ.

sasquatch_steve

awww

Unkle_Bob

I really wish people would stop referring to "post-9/11". Who cares? It's a difficult situation regardless of if it happened today, the day before 9/11, 20 years ago, or 20 years in the future. 9/11 has nothing to do with it.

Kyle

that's such a post-9/11 thing to say.

Peanut_Butter

Your post was posted post-9/11.

j44ke

A smaller version of this happens every day during rush hour at the bottom of the escalators at the 53rd St. E station. All the Path people want to be at the front of the downtown E train so they can make their Path connection at WTC, so they stand at the Lexington end of the platform. But that's where the escalators & stairs empty out, creating a giant pile up of people. The MTA "solves" this with a few railings supplemented by yellow plastic tape and a conductor with a flashlight on the platform as people-herder. Somehow no one has toppled onto the tracks, but I've seen near misses frequently. My European friends like to make fun of how risk averse Americans are, but if there was tightrope over a pit of fire that led to the train home at the end of the day, New Yorkers would cross it.

Karen Rose

Extremely poor crowd control seems to me to have been the main issue. When we finally emerged, we could see that the space left for the egress of thousand of passengers from the station was a quarter the size of the space in which they were holding the couple of hundred people waiting to enter. There was no reason they couldn't have moved that crowd over to wait on the side so people could exit. Pretty terrifying in a post-9/11 world.

whosonfirst123

Be glad you don't live in DC. The metro escalators never work and are often blocked off. Scenes like this are fairly common.

Tim Osman

Was there a "lets go giants" cheer from the crowd?

ItchyGomez

"and for safety reasons they shut down the escalators"

"In a post-9/11 world you don't want to take any chances."

Yes, that definitely looks very safe. force thousands of people into a small area and then invoke the imagery of a massive explosion to justify it. What??

Kate Kaye

Hell? Please. I was there this morning around 9:20, and waited for around 15 minutes or so. No big deal, except maybe for the overanxious people who aren't regular WTC commuters and freak out whenever they're in the station or at ground zero. Get over it.

Colin Fowler

Just walk up the stairs and shut the fuck up about it.

James Evans

Either you weren't there or you're not at all observant. It wasn't that people didn't want to walk up the stairs. It's that, once they reached the top, there was nowhere to go. There was a huge bottleneck at the exit and the people on the stairs (the ones on the left anyway) had nowhere to go. What the hell were they trying to accomplish with that?

Joamiq

People aren't complaining that they had to walk up the stairs. It was that you couldn't move. Take two steps. Wait 3 minutes. Take another step. Etc.

pendejito

Yeah, because the people in front of you were complaing about climbing up stairs.

zincink

wow look! people with jobs!

theevilerone

And I thought living in Jersey was punishment enough...

AGWAGW

What if the trespasser had been a suicide bomber? Their safety procedures produced a very large crowd of people in a small space with minimal points of egress. It's almost like doing the bomber a favor. Here's an idea, if you are worried about potential terrorism, don't come up with safety procedures that trap people inside the system.

DPG_64

I just escaped that mess at the WTC PATH station...announcements kept saying the escalators had been turned off as a safety precaution due to the number of people trying to get in and out of the station. The actual cause of the problem has yet to be explained, at least to my satisfaction.

What I do know is that the police should have done more to clear the area around the entrance to the station so that the thousands of people trapped below could get out. This was a dangerous situation and should not be dismissed as just an equipment malfunction. People can and have been seriously hurt in similar venues without effective crowd control and lessons need to be learned before it happens here.

Adam Rauscher

Was I the only one paying attention? The escalators weren't broken. There were trucks going in and out of the WTC construction site, so the space to exit was extremely limited. They shut off the escalators to slow the flow of people. They had people directing traffic, holding people at bottlenecks to prevent overcrowding in other areas. It wasn't well executed, but that's what they said at least. More great journalism.

Betty

Think of all the cardio workouts they got! With no gym fees!

Kate Falanga

This morning's commute is in my top 3 "Worst Commute" ever. I'm actually kind of pleasantly surprised that people acted really polite and nice for the most part. One lady started yelling at the people stuck at the elevators and I was kind of worried things would get worse but they didn't while I was there. People just shuffled along.

Really though people needed to stop taking pictures and move. People would just stop on the stairs to take pics of the crowd making the situation worse. Sign of the times I guess.

Jimmy Hemeda

Why in the hell did they block off the whole left side of the exit and let people stand there so nobody could get out. They should have just made it an exit only and told people trying to get in that they need to wait elsewhere or take the subway to Christopher St. If the exit was fully opened up I really doubt that the pileup would be nearly as bad just because the escalators were out of order.

Joamiq

That was INCREDIBLY stupid. They added another bottleneck at the end of all the congestion, making the problem 10x worse. Everyone exiting the station was forced into a tiny path, and most of the entrance was reserved for people entering the station - as if there was any room inside the station for people to enter anyway!

Fronko

Meanwhile, James Vacca and the City Council's transportation committee were focused on making things easier for drivers and...hey, bikes!

whiteiris

Broken record.

e non

so good to see that the nypd has crowd control, uh, under control.
i guess they're too accustomed to corralling people and saw the crowd and acted accordingly.

pendejito

With all the experience using orange netting, I am surprised at their failed efforts at crowd control.

randomtransplant

Too many people on the platform? 'net 'em boys! Let them sort it out down in booking.

ihazconservative

Glad I don’t use that station. But what’s particularly appalling to me is that the station relies so heavily on mechanized means to get people out. Come on! It’s the WTC – it should be at lot easier to flee that station if one needed to do so.

Unkle_Bob

I'm confused. They rely so much on mechanized means. What are the alternatives? Your feet? They need stairs for that. And hey! Escalators work as stairs too!

randomtransplant

Emergency exits along the length of the concourse which could be opened in a coordinated evacuation.

gossipmag

i hiked up the stairs, but all of that overcrowding on the escalators was due to cops and PATH personnel not allowing those on the escalators to exit.. no idea why, but i just know those people were stuck and not allowed to move

Ian MacAllen

Probably the result of "deferred maintenance" policies. The Port Authority cannot keep escalators functioning. I say without sarcasm that at any given moment at least one station's escalators are malfunctioning.

Dan Dickinson

I actually the the escalators were shut down as a reaction to the crowding in the station, not that the crowding was caused by the escalators being down.

When I got to WTC at around 8:25 this morning, there was a crowd on the platform for Tracks 4 & 5 (Newark-bound), which is pretty typical. Then there was slow from the concourse up to where the turnstiles were.

The escalators were still running when I came through, but there was massive congestion at the top area near the entrance. I can't quite figure out what the cause of the congestion was, other than that as people came through the Vessey St. walkway they had to cross in front of people trying to get out and it lead to a logjam. But there were so many people in that upper area that I had to quickly dodge to the side so the people behind me wouldn't run into me.

I would guess the escalators got shut down shortly thereafter to avoid people crashing into one another.

Ian MacAllen

Ever since they put scaffolding over Vessey east of the PATH entrance, everything has been moving slowly over there. Still, its curious how this would happen; even people keep coming up the escalators it would seem the sensible thing would be to get out of the way. However, perhaps this result isn't surprising given how often PATH riders take a single step into the train without any consideration for the ten other people trying to get on the train and then wonder why people are shoving them from behind.