Finally home

[beowabbit]

Thanks to plumtreeblossom for that previous post!

I’m finally home. Copied and pasted from an IM session, here’s the short version of my evening:

Wow, that was an adventure!
I was caught up in the chaos downtown. Heard the announcement that Park Street was offline and they were bussing both directions, so I got out at Boylston (where there were a few emergency vehicles), found a restaurant, had a very leisurely dinner, and walked to Downtown Crossing hoping I could catch the Red Line there.
But Downtown Crossing was crawling with fire trucks and ambulances too, and they were sending people back to Park Street to wait for busses, which still hadn't started running. (So everybody who *didn't* stop to have dinner had been waiting all that time.)
When a bus eventually picked us up, the driver assented to the overwhelming demand of the crowd to go to JFK/UMass -- he had no instructions about where to go -- but he didn't know how to get there, so he recruited a volunteer navigator.
And traffic was very very slow on I-93, probably mostly because of the T being down, but also partly because the highway department happened to choose today to trim the branches of the trees down the median.

(According to announcements in the bus, no Red Line trains were running between Harvard and JFK/UMass, and there was some Orange Line service shut down too.)

I didn’t see any evidence of injury, but then by the time I arrived on the scene it had been nearly an hour since the original evacuation of the stations.

Not quite what I planned for the evening, but I’m home now and I have a kitty who’s glad I’m home.

Comments

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

According to Boston.com, there were two separate fires, one at South Station and one at Chinatown. Downtown Crossing was affected because the smoke from those two fires spread to there.

[devoken.livejournal.com]

Wow. That is a lot worse than I'd understood. I wonder if the two fires were just a coincidence, or due to a larger rail problem.

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

According to boston.com, this is what they think now:

Cable failure apparently caused by old wiring sparked a fire in a Red Line tunnel at South Station around 6:35 p.m., according to the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.

At about the same time, T officials suspect that a customer threw debris onto the third rail of an Orange Line track in the tunnel at the Chinatown station, sparking a second fire.