City officials met with the police, fire department, and MTA to discuss subway evacuation plans yesterday. The FDNY said that it is "much more prepared today than we had been back in 2001" and cited special phone jacks firefighters can use in radio dead zones. But the City Council was skeptical. amNew York reports that transportation committee chairman Councilman John Liu wondered why there was so much focus on "extreme disaster situations" when track fires are much more common.
And then there was much vitriol for the high entrance/exit turnstiles (HEET, for short). Our readers have called HEETS "baby back ribs of death" as well as "meat grinders," and it seems that the City Council agrees. Well, Peter Vallone, at least, who as the council's public safety chairman said, "You decided to lock our riders in like third-class citizens on the Titantic," and claimed HEETs violate fire code.
The MTA says that there are emergency exits and 40 people per minute can exit through a HEET. Um, have they done user testing with HEETs, because those things are heavy and people have a hard time pushing through them, once they figure out which way to go.
And the photograph above is but a small excerpt of an amazing series of photographs by Bill Sullivan. Sullivan has taken many pictures of people entering through turnstiles - no Metrotarding seen, though.
