Washington DC Metro system to shut down for 29 hours for safey inspection

There was a blaze outside the McPherson Square station in the city center that, in turn, led to morning rush-hour delays on the orange, blue and silver lines. As a result, the entire Metro system in Washington DC will shut down from midnight for 29 hours of safety inspections.
This has been reported in news.sky.com dated 15 March 2016.

This move has come after an electric cable caught fire before the subway system in the nation's capital opened in the morning. The Metro general manager indicated that a total of nearly 600 "jumper cables" along all tunnel segments throughout the system, the second-biggest in the US, had to be checked. Once it was over, there may be a need for additional rail service outages.
Incidentally, the city's metro has been under scrutiny over a fire incident last year. A woman had died and 86 other commuters were injured when an electrical malfunction filled a tunnel with smoke near L'Enfant Plaza station last year. Investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board into the January 2015 blaze found chronic issues with electrical wiring, crumbling equipment and under-trained staff.
The system has been closed on rare occasions for weather reasons and this is the first time the entire network has been shut for maintenance. The metro had opened in 1976 and has six lines and 91 stations and transports 710,000 passengers daily from the District to Maryland and Virginia.


Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org

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