Please stand clear of the falling bricks.
MTA officials knew the ceiling at the 181st Street station on the No. 1 line was a collapse risk for an entire decade — and still were unable to repair it before bricks rained down on the tracks last summer, according to a blockbuster report that the agency’s inspector general revealed yesterday.
“The danger signs were evident but were unattended to,” said Barry Kluger, the MTA’s chief independent inspector.
The scathing report said, “Managers had learned in 1999 that a portion of the ceiling at 181st Street was at risk of collapse.”
The report also exposed two other collapses that occurred because of communication breakdowns between inspectors:
* A section of a metal ceiling fell to the platform at the Bowling Green station on the No. 4/5 line in 2007.
* An 8-foot panel of platform concrete plummeted to the street from the elevated F line station at 18th Avenue in Brooklyn in 2009.
Luckily, no one was injured in any of the three instances. Two happened in the early hours.
Still, Kluger said, unsuspecting straphangers may not be so lucky next time.
“Absolutely, people’s safety was in danger. This isn’t an isolated incident,” he warned. “[MTA managers] were not working together. It’s a no-brainer.”
At the heart of the breakdown are two divisions responsible for inspecting station conditions — one reviews every year, the other every five years — that failed to talk to each other about the deteriorating conditions.
Some metal ceilings and elevated concrete platforms got no scrutiny at all, leaving the risk of failure “unacceptably high.”
And finally, there was a lack of up-close inspections — for example, most ceiling reviews were done from platform level.
Kluger’s recommendations are simple: The MTA should create a list of all ceilings with panels, assign responsibility for them, and make sure both divisions see each other’s reports.
Top MTA brass admitted to the shortcomings, and said they’re trying to get the fixes in place.
They “support the recommendations,” said spokesman Charles Seaton. “Some have already been undertaken, and guidelines are currently being developed for the implementation of others.”
The subway system has 142 elevated stations and each one has one or more concrete platforms.
In the case of the concrete panel on the F line, the MTA conducted an emergency review of every single one, and found that the Court House Square station on the No. 7 line in Queens had similar conditions.
The MTA then scrambled to “add wooden supports directly below the platforms,” the report said.
Remaining platforms, the MTA said, were better designed than those two examples.