By Steven Ginsberg
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 26, 2005; Page A03

Washington's Metrorail system is vulnerable to the same kind of fire that crippled two subway lines in New York for as long as six months, Metro officials said yesterday.

Metro officials said there is no way to completely guard against a control room fire such as the one started by a homeless person in lower Manhattan. That blaze charred a room filled with hundreds of relays, switches and other critical components. New York officials said this week the damage could take years to fix completely and restore service on the A and C lines -- with about 580,000 weekday riders -- but yesterday they said the repairs would take about six months.

Metro officials said it could take more than a year to order, receive and test replacement parts because they are so specialized and so few companies manufacture them. "The situation in New York shows you how vulnerable we are," said Metro Assistant General Manager P. Takis Salpeas.

Salpeas said if something similar happened in Washington, operators would be forced to switch to manual operation and service would be reduced drastically. Salpeas said the worst-case scenario would be a problem where two lines converge, such as in Rosslyn, where the Blue and Orange lines come together. An incident there would cut service from about 29 trains an hour to as few as six.

Metro dealt with a similar problem in the summer when an electronic control room at the Silver Spring Station flooded, forcing operators to conduct trains manually. That reduced capacity and slowed trains along the Red Line to 15 mph, compared with the normal 55 mph, and left riders delayed, packed in cars and unhappy for the two weeks or so that it took to repair the line.

Metro spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein said the same scenario likely would occur in Washington if a New York-style incident took place. "Trains would be crowded, customers would be irritated, traffic would be slower and service would not be as reliable," she said.

And for much longer. Farbstein said Metro had been able to stockpile replacement parts over the years, allowing workers to fix problems at Silver Spring in a matter of days, rather than months.

Now that those parts have been used, "It would be highly likely that we'd be in the same situation New York is in," Farbstein said. "If we had to do that today, because we don't have that equipment in storage, it would cost several millions of dollars and take months and months to fix."

In some respects, Metro is in a better situation than New York's system, transit experts said. Washington's system was built under stricter fire codes and with less flammable material than the New York system, which is more than 100 years old. For instance, parts of the New York system use wooden track ties; Washington's are concrete.

"In D.C., their equipment is much more protected," said David A. Boate, a vice president at DMJM and Harris Inc., an engineering and construction firm in New Jersey.

"If you get a fire down there with some garbage in the system, the chance of fire happening from the track structure is very remote."

Still, Boate cautioned that there is no way to be entirely protected. "Absolutely, it still could happen," he said. "I'm not so sure what Washington Metro or anyone else can do about it."