The air conditioning died in Serena Nguyen’s downtown office building Wednesday, and when she stepped outside into Farragut Square, she was hit with a wall of heat and humidity. She ducked into the Farragut North Metro station expecting some measure of relief. Instead, Nguyen was left feeling what she could only describe as “gross.”
On the station platform, 62-year-old Bill Craft of Bethesda fetched a cloth from his pocket to wipe the sweat from his forehead. “Oh boy,” he muttered as his packed train pulled up. “It’s gonna be a really ugly ride.”
Karick Bintliff, 32, of Silver Spring took refuge in the gust of a passing train.
“It creates a decent breeze,” he said.
[Think it’s hot outside? Try Metro’s Farragut North and Dupont stations.]
Metro General Manager Paul J. Wiedefeld heads down stairs as he leads a tour of chiller units located on the Metro Red Line near the Farragut North Metro Station on Monday May 15, 2017. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post) For Metro riders who have sweltered through two steamy summers along a downtown stretch of the Red Line, where a chilled air system has been out of commission since 2015, the unseasonably hot weather Wednesday a was jolting reminder that the problemhasn’t been fixed.
“It’s irritatingly warm,” said Carver Sinn, 45, of Arlington, who works in Farragut Square. “It’s depressing — makes you wanna get on a train as quickly as possible and when one doesn’t come for several minutes, it further depresses you.”
(We won’t get into the issue of the agency’s “hot car” problem.)
But Metro says relief is on the way. After two failed attempts to repair the chiller system that brings cool air into the stations — including an effort to use sealant on leaky pipes, Metro says it’s confident that a new, temporary solution will work.
Metro’s stations are not air-conditioned and never have been. However, mechanical air-cooling systems — including components called chiller plants — use water, pumps and fans to lower the temperature of outside air and push it across station platforms.
[Metro’s ‘hot car’ problem: Riders get heated over broken air conditioners]
It’s still not like air conditioning — it only makes the air inside a station about six degrees cooler than the temperature outside. But on a day like Wednesday, the first 90-degree day of the season, six degrees can make a big difference.
The problem for the Farragut North and Dupont Circle stations is a set of 500-foot pipes below the street that have sprung leaks, preventing the water from reaching a cooling tower 13 stories up at 1101 Connecticut Ave. That is preventing the chilled air from being returned to the stations.
The agency plans to install a temporary cooling tower outside Farragut North to provide chilled air service to train hubs. Metro hasn’t set an official date, however, and said it is “in the process” of bringing in a contractor to supply the tower.
[Video: How the cooling systems at Metro stations work]
“We are pushing as hard as we can to expedite the process,” Metro spokesman Dan Stessel said.
Stessel said the fix, which includes pipes and a power supply, could come around late June or early July, “barring any unforeseen hurdles.”
Renting the temporary cooling tower for six monthswill cost about $65,000, Metro said. The connection work — running piping to and from the chiller plant and feeding fresh water and a power supply to the system — is expected to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the agency said. Metro declined to provide a more specific estimate, saying it did not want to influence a procurement process that isin its bidding phase.
Metro says there will be no further attempts to salvage the defective pipes, which date back to the system’s opening 40 years ago and snake around existing utilities beneath Connecticut Avenue,
On Monday, Metro General Manager Paul J. Wiedefeld led reporters on a tour of the chiller plant that sits about 40 feet below Connecticut Avenue in an effort to put the agency’s dated and crumbling infrastructure on public display.
“This issue here is the piping under the street,” Wiedefeld said. “It does reflect, basically, the larger issue — this is a 40-year-old [system]. This stuff all needs to be constantly maintained and replaced at times . . . This is just the air-conditioning portion.”
There are 32 cooling plants across the system similar to the one underneath Conneciticut Avenue. The agency did not rule out the possibility that the others are prone to the same failures.
“It’s a whole different appreciation of what we’re up against when you physically see it, so I think it’s important to do that,” Wiedefeld said. “It’s like, ‘This is what we have; this is what we want.’ Do we want air conditioning or not? Do we want air conditioning? This is what it takes.”
But even if Metro can supply a fix this summer, the overall problem remains: The broken pipes need to be replaced, and doing so may require digging up the busy stretch of Connecticut Avenue, according to the transit agency, a potentially expensive, multiyear venture.
For customers on a crowded platform on a sultry spring afternoon, there was a sense of surprise, but then acceptance, that it could take the transit agency years to fix a broken cooling system.
“There’s kind of an expectation that the Metro will do as the Metro does,” said Zach Padgett, 23, of Northwest Washington, after entering the Farragut North station. “It felt like I walked into kind of a stuffy box.”
Then there were those who wondered whether there weren’t more important things to worry about than a hot, musty subway station.
“It’s hot outside and it’s hot down here,” said Ana Hadad, 50, of Potomac. “As long as it’s not a long wait. it doesn’t bother me.”
Marysue Shore, of Northwest Washington, said she too expected the conditions she encountered Wednesday, after two straight summers of extended and sweat-inducing waits on platforms.
“I come to the subway and know I’m gonna sweat to death,” she said. “Everybody crowds around the vents to take in whatever air there is.”
There was Ashton Barry, 27, of Annapolis, who said walking into Metro on Wednesday was like a “hot shower.” And the descriptions only got more cringe-inducing from there.
“It just smells like hot feet, which is just awful,” said Erin Phillips, 29, of Bowie, Md. “You just get this wall of polluted air, city air — contaminated D.C. air — rushing up in your face.”
But among the disgruntled riders, there were also the totally indifferent, such asKenny Carey, 51, of Arlington, who was waiting on the Dupont Circle platform with two space heaters he said he had just purchased in the neighborhood for $15 apiece. With temperatures rising, he said, it was a good time to score a deal on winter appliances.
“Compared to outside,” Carey said behind his reflective sunglasses, “I’m feeling pretty cool, actually.”