For most New Yorkers, it was a blink-or-you-miss out on-it celebration. Lights flickered across the town on Sunday night time. Some clocks reset.

But for the city’s subway technique, the power blip experienced a considerably higher impression: Five trains ended up caught on the tracks in the Bronx and in a tunnel beneath the Harlem River, as delays snarled the community. Some riders evacuated subway cars on their own, violating Metropolitan Transportation Authority procedures by climbing onto the tracks — and forcing subway officials to slash electric power to the 3rd rail to keep away from the possibility of electrocution.

The minute underscored the fragility of the transit program, which has experienced from many years of disinvestment and was just commencing to embark on an formidable application of infrastructure updates when the pandemic strike. The challenges also threatened to undermine assurance in a method whose funds are presently suffering from a pandemic-induced fall in ridership.

The incident established off a rush to react amongst point out officers, as well as a challenge for amateur sleuths eager to ascertain what went completely wrong.

In New York City, electrical power classes through a network of higher-voltage transmission feeders, substations and reduce-voltage distribution feeders on its way to powering residences and corporations. Transmission feeders carry electrical energy in bulk, much as the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway carries autos en masse. It was that kind of feeder, functioning underground in Prolonged Island Town, Queens, that unsuccessful at about 8:25 p.m. on Sunday, causing a manhole fire