Oh, Anthony Weiner, what's up with you pulling a Schumer and having a Sunday press conference? And a press conference for you to bitch about the MTA's lax trash can security, no less?
For those of you not hanging on every word Mr. Weiner has to say, the gist of his conference was this: IN 2004, after the subway bombings in Madrid, a directive came down from the Department of Homeland Security telling the MTA to install bomb-resistant trash cans in it's 468 subway stations.
Two years later the MTA has still not complied. Other cities like Atalanta, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C. have installed the $4,000 a pop cans, so why haven't we? Well, according to transit spokesperson Paul Fleuranges, they just wouldn't work here since our city is built so vertically. If a bomb went off in one of these cans "they would direct the force of an explosion straight up into the ceiling and the floors above." Which doesn't exactly sounds like fun to us. Guess that those new clear bins are about as much trash security as we can expect from the MTA for a while (we hope they help keep the track fires down).
Meanwhile, as we mentioned on Saturday, yesterday the city held a massive dry run for how it would handle a toxic event in our rail yards, in this case in Queens. Those tests, according to Commissioner of Emergency Management Joseph F. Bruno, though still grim had better results than expected. Though that didn't prevent the Times from having a good long think on the safety of our rail lines in general.
Bin from janelle's flickr stream.
