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.

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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?