The images are spectacular. New York’s best-known and busiest subway station, Times Square, fell prey Tuesday at dawn to a spectacular flood caused by a ruptured pipe in this megacity with aging infrastructure.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) released videos and photos on Tuesday of curtains of water cascading around 3 a.m. from the ceilings of the Times Square-42nd Street station in the heart of Manhattan, and very quickly engulfing the tracks of several lines. .
The macadam also flooded on the surface
The MTA New York City Transit, which operates one of the world’s oldest and densest subway systems – which operates 365 days a year, 24 hours a day – said on its website that a large pipe under the causeway had broken at 7th Avenue and 40th Street in Manhattan. On the photos and videos distributed to the press, we see the flooded macadam on the surface and the level of the water which rises very quickly on the underground tracks of the metro.
Of course, traffic was interrupted and the water supply cut off in the area, while hundreds of MTA workers and engineers pumped and cleaned up. Everything was back to normal by midday.
A metro more than a century old
The New York subway, whose very first operation dates back to 1868 and the commissioning dates from 1904, is one of the most sprawling in the world but its infrastructures are often in poor condition in a megalopolis of more than 8.5 million of inhabitants.
Times Square, with its illuminated billboards, is one of the busiest places in New York with millions of tourists flocking there each year.