DC Metro: Safety inspections to shut down Washington’s rail system

(CNN) — The entire Metrorail system in the nation’s capital will be shut down until Thursday morning for safety inspections of electrical cables, officials said Tuesday.

The closure, starting at midnight Wednesday, comes after an electrical fire in a Metro tunnel on Monday caused the shutdown of three subway lines, said Paul J. Wiedefeld, the system’s general manager and CEO. The early-morning electrical fire involved a cable in the tunnel outside McPherson Square station.

The system shutdown is the first that is not weather-related.

Jack Evans, Metro’s chair, said the closure will have a major impact on travel in the region.

“Without Metro, it’s going to have a lot of congestion,” he said. “It’s going to be very difficult, we recognize that, for people to get into work, for children to get to school, for everyone who relies on Metro, but safety is paramount. We need to get to the bottom of this.”

Preliminary findings of the cause of the fire “show commonalities” with another cable fire last year, he said.

“While the risk to the public is very low,” Wiedefeld said, “I cannot rule out a potential life safety issue here and this is why we must take this action immediately.”

In last year’s fire, one passenger died after smoke filled the L’Enfant Plaza metro station in downtown Washington. A total of 84 people were treated by local hospitals, according to emergency officials.

After the L’Enfant Plaza fire, the National Transportation and Safety Board released a statement saying “an electrical arcing event” sparked the incident.

“There was an electrical arcing event involving the trackside power cables (the third rail),” said a statement from the NTSB’s Peter Knudson.

The inspections of about 600 “jumper cables” will occur along all tunnel segments on the Metrorail system.

“From where I sit, the safety of the public and my employees is paramount,” Wiedefeld said.

At the conclusion of the inspections, there may be a need for additional rail service outages, Wiedefeld said.

He said city bus service will operate normally.

Metrorail provides service for more than 700,000 customers a day throughout the Washington area. It’s the second-busiest system in the nation, serving 91 stations in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia, according to its website.