Watch: STM responds to metro mayhem
MONTREAL – It could have been the ideal setting for a Stephen King novel or a blockbuster horror movie.
But this was anything but fiction.
Over a thousand public transit passengers were stranded for more than one hour on a stopped metro train in between the Sherbrooke and Mont-Royal stations in Montreal.
The Orange Line subway train made an abrupt halt at the height of Tuesday afternoon rush hour, and that’s when the terrifying ordeal began.
First, the lights in all the train cars went out.
Then, the air ventilation system was cut.
“We didn’t know what was going on. We though it was terrorist attack,” Carla Paciucci said.
She was making her way home on the metro when the train stopped.
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“You’ve got a train filled with commuters that were going crazy with the unknown,” she added.
“No communication, in the dark and no air.”
Société de transport de Montréal (STM) officials were forced to stop the train when a person was spotted walking along the tracks in the tunnel.
The entire electrical system had to be shut down.
But Paciucci said that the train conductor spoke to the stranded passengers only once during the one-hour ordeal.
A smartphone video recording of the event from a passenger on board revealed that someone tried to pry open one of the doors from the inside of the train.
Eventually people had to jump down from the train onto the adjacent tracks and walk through the tunnel in complete darkness until emerging to a lit station.
“They lacked tremendously on the evacuation and rescue procedures,” Paciucci said.
The daily metro commuter has written a letter condemning Montreal’s transit authority for how it handled the emergency evacuation.
STM response
The STM told Global News that it is listening to its customers and is learning from its mistakes.
“We will learn if we have to do something better next time,” STM CEO Carl Desrosiers said.
Desrosiers noted it takes about 20 minutes to evacuate each train car.
So those passengers waiting on cars at the end of the line would have been forced to wait longer before being allowed out of the train.
Desrosiers said the incident is under investigation and corrective evacuation measures will be made in the future if required.
He also countered that STM officials were in communication with passengers more than once.
“From the information I got from my employee, we sent several messages,” he said.
“Not enough of course but we will investigate that.”
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