Trees down, trains stuck, and general transit mayhem from last night’s rainstorm
Last night’s rain apocalypse caused a gnarly evening of commute on both BART and Muni. A tree fell on the tracks of the J-Church train in the photo above, blocking both directions. And a power outage shortly after 7 p.m. blocked all trains between Van Ness and Church, reports the San Francisco Examiner.
Earlier that evening, if you were amongst the evening commute crowd on BART, you’ll know that the fallen tree near the Balboa Station between 24th Street and Balboa station caused a BART outage that snowballed into this scene at BART, where riders were scaling the broken escalator:
Chaos erupts in the #MissionStreet #BART station as storm related delays frustrate riders: #SanFrancisco: https://t.co/2YXMVu4GEH. pic.twitter.com/KdtMvT4pMh
— ABC7 News (@abc7newsbayarea) January 11, 2017
24th Mission Street Station Chaos. #SFBART #BART #SF .@SFBART pic.twitter.com/b5tlV3lUXz
— Charlie K. Perkins (@PerKerry) January 11, 2017
Sanfransokyo @nbcbayarea #sfbart pic.twitter.com/QAGRa8bs58
— Aleksey Smolenchuk (@lxe) January 11, 2017
As of 9 p.m. last night, service was still shut down between Daly City and 24th Street Station, says SFGate. Rescue trains came to get the stranded passengers to free Muni shuttles, reports SFist. In the East Bay, AC Transit buses were also backed up due to a power line falling near a school, reports SFGate.
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I arrived at Powell BART, heard the announcement that service was down, so went to the Muni platform. After several packed trains where no one could get on, I boarded an M, which dumped everyone off at Forest Hill because a power outage had shut down that part of the system. I was grateful to be able to get a Lyft (came in 3 minutes!) that cost me $14 to go the remaining 2 miles to my house (100% surge pricing!) in the torrential downpour. So happy to get home last night.
I have heard that even some ferry commuters were rerouted to buses as the rough waves on the bay made docking ferries hazardous.