BART says it’s taken steps to avoid a repeat of the Sept. 5 systemwide shutdown

After a six-hour workday shutdown earlier this month, BART officials say the agency will do cable maintenance only on weekends to avoid another halt like the one that affected 44,000 riders and cost the system $200,000 in lost fare revenue.

BART also will do a better job alerting the public about planned cable upgrading work, said Chris Filippi, BART spokesman. 

“Going forward when this work happens on the weekend, we will notify the public in advance, isolate the area being worked on to ensure if there is an issue it will not spread to impact the rest of the system, and we will perform additional testing after each cable move,” Filippi said recently.

The Sept. 5 outage began at 3 a.m., after a maintenance crew attempted to replace network routers and switches at San Francisco’s Montgomery Street Station. Half an hour before service was to begin at 5 a.m., BART engineers realized the trains were not starting. 

“As soon as we learned around 4:30 a.m. that service was not going to be available, we updated our riders through our website, social media accounts, text, email and media outlets,” Filippi said.

“Of course it’s very challenging at short notice, and we agree that we have let our riders down,” he added.

The effects of the outage rippled into workplaces, classrooms and offices across the Bay Area. In Rockridge, Ashley Gao, a caseworker at a San Francisco nonprofit, was preparing for work when a quick glance at her phone derailed her day.

“I was like, ‘Not again,’ when I read the notification from BART,” Gao said. With trains idle, Gao drove into San Francisco, arriving an hour late to work — the second time this year due to a BART shutdown.

“Aside from traffic, which was terrible, parking in San Francisco is also expensive. I spent $20 that day. I was stressed,” Gao said.

Spate of problems

The agency had been doing similar upgrades on weekdays and had been successful eight times in the past, Filippi said, adding that there is more staff during the week to speed up maintenance work.  The shutdown occurred as BART was upgrading its core network by replacing aging routers and switches that connect the control center at San Francisco to the rest of the system.

“It has to do with the work that we were doing to upgrade the core network that BART systems rely upon to operate, improve reliability and speed communications across the system,” Filippi said.

The systemwide shutdown was the second major incident on BART in a week and the third in four months. Service between Oakland and San Francisco was shut down when smoke filled a train car in the Transbay Tube on Aug. 29. And in May, an electrical fault triggered a fire near the San Leandro Station, causing an outage in parts of the East Bay for four hours. 

BART board member Mark Foley said at a meeting that the recent outage was unacceptable and a blow to public trust.

 “We have lost money,” he said, “but most importantly, our reputation has been affected.”

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