Issue #874 (42), Tuesday, June 10, 2003

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Subway Wreck Causes Moscow Panic

By Nabi Abdullaev

Staff Writer

MOSCOW - A derailed metro car shut down a large stretch of Moscow's busy green line for nine hours on Monday, creating huge traffic jams in northern and central Moscow as hundreds of thousands of frantic passengers tried to get to work or school.

"When I stepped out on Tverskaya this morning, the street reminded me of Moscow on the day of Josef Stalin's funeral," Sergei Sidorov, an Interfax journalist, said in a telephone interview.

Nine people received medical assistance after suffering panic attacks Monday, Interfax reported, citing the city's ambulance service. Two were hospitalized.

But the biggest problem was inconvenience in a subway system that prides itself as being one of the most efficient in the world.

The trouble began at 6:40 a.m. when the chassis supporting the wheels of the first car of a train heading from Novokuznetskaya to Teatralnaya ruptured, metro officials said. The car partially derailed, and a pair of its wheels flew off the tracks, chewing up 200 meters of high-voltage cable in the tunnel.

Several minutes later, metro workers began evacuating passengers, who had to walk along the tunnel to the next station, Teatralnaya. All passengers on the train were evacuated by 7:45, and none complained of any injuries, metro and emergency officials said.

Trains traveling between the southern Avtozavodskaya and northern Belorusskaya metro stations let their passengers off at the nearest stop at the time of the incident. Service between the two stations was then suspended.

By the time the last passengers were evacuated at Teatralnaya, Mosgortrans, the city transportation company, had put 37 shuttle buses in service between the metro stations along the closed section of the green line and the nearest operating stations. By Monday afternoon, the number of the buses had swelled to 153, Interfax reported, citing Mosgortrans.

As morning rush hour neared at 9 a.m., pandemonium broke out at many stations on the traditionally overloaded green line and on parallel lines, which had to deal with an influx of passengers.

Police officers directed the crowds in and outside the metro and, by all accounts, did so amiably.