NYT: Fix Everything Wrong at 23 Subway Stations? It Beats His Last Job

[GojiMet86]

Just a little read during this weird period in history.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/nyregion/subway-complaints-nyc.html

 

 

Quote

 

Fix Everything Wrong at 23 Subway Stations? It Beats His Last Job

The group manager is responsible for everything from broken elevators to smashed lights to overflowing toilets.

Michael E. Brown manages 23 New York City subway stations. Credit...Earl Wilson/The New York Times

 

By Andy Newman and Earl Wilson

March 17, 2020Updated 12:59 p.m. ET

 

Even on a good day, Michael E. Brown’s job is infinite.

He is a group station manager for the New York City subway system in charge of 23 stations, mostly along the F line in Brooklyn.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority created the position in 2018 to be the place where the buck stops for every conceivable impediment to the smooth operation of a subway station.

Mr. Brown, 44, an ex-military analyst whose previous jobs include tracking trends in missile development and improvised explosive devices, has spent the last 18 months battling the more pedestrian forces of destruction and decay and vandalism that assail the ancient, overtaxed transit system.

Lately, of course, Mr. Brown’s job has changed. It now consists largely of overseeing the cleaning and disinfecting of all touchable surfaces in every station under his watch, twice a day. This means handrails, turnstiles, benches, booth ledges, touchscreens — “everything a passenger can lay their hands on,” Mr. Brown said last Thursday.

It means getting cleaning supplies to stations from Brooklyn Heights to Coney Island and coordinating overtime schedules. It means attending many, many meetings. It means taking time to quell fears and squelch rumors among passengers and workers alike.

And yet the background churn of chaos continues.

The other day, Mr. Brown decided to close both the men’s and women’s public restrooms at Jay Street-MetroTech station, the sprawling, four-line complex in Downtown Brooklyn that is the heart of his kingdom and the second-busiest station in Brooklyn. Someone had stuffed newspapers and shoelaces down one of the men’s toilets and torn a stall door off its hinges in the women’s.

He had just reopened the bathrooms two weeks before, after closing them for months in the wake of an Unusual Occurrence — one of many categories of incident that group station managers painstakingly log and track — in which a bathroom custodian was threatened.

“Up until that point, I actually had it opened for its longest period of time,” Mr. Brown said. “But I can’t have my employees threatened down there.”

On a drizzly Thursday in February shortly before coronavirus commandeered every inch of the city’s consciousness, Mr. Brown allowed a reporter and a photographer to tag along as he made his rounds.

He showed off one of his first projects, near a staircase that led up to Jay Street. For years, people had been ducking down those stairs to urinate in a little alcove, up against a door to the elevator and escalator repair division. The E&E guys did not like stepping through urine.

Mr. Brown located a length of iron gate left over from the renovation of the Seventh Avenue station, five stops away, enlisted a maintenance crew to move it to Jay Street, and wrangled the necessary ironworkers and electricians to rig up a gate with an electronic latch that secured the alcove.

These kinds of jobs, which involve workers from different divisions across multiple stations, are one of the main reasons the transit authority created group station managers.

“It’s only the G.S.M.,” Mr. Brown said, “that can coordinate all the different departments.”

Many woes afflicting the subway originate outside, making them challenging to address.

On the mezzanine level near the stairs down to the R-train platform, the ceiling leaks periodically; the floor tiles beneath the drip line are stained brownish-black, like bad teeth. Mr. Brown believes that the source is a hydrant up on Jay Street leaking into the substrate of the street. Getting it attended to will require reaching out to the authority’s interagency liaison who will in turn reach out to the City Department of Environmental Protection, which controls hydrants.

For the meantime, Mr. Brown consulted with a maintenance supervisor, John Carabello. “We’ll bring the paint foreman here, touch it up quick, and that should hold it,” Mr. Carabello said.

A few feet away, near the escalator down to the platform, the maintenance team had hung an evaporation pan.

Evaporation pans are the unsung Band-Aids of the transit system: plain metal trays in which water collects, and, ideally, evaporates before it overflows. Once you know what they look like, you see them on subway ceilings everywhere.

The half-inch-deep pan by the escalator was apparently insufficient: A second pan, an inch-and-a-half deep, was affixed just beneath it. Problem solved.

Some unusual occurrences occur in streaks. The elevated Smith-Ninth Streets station is right near a Lowe’s hardware superstore. Three times in recent months, Mr. Brown said, Lowe’s customers were bringing home long pieces of construction material via subway and carrying them upright on the escalator, only to have them smash into the ceiling overhang.

“There was one woman carrying a long pipe vertically and resting it on her foot,” Mr. Brown said. When the pipe struck the ceiling, it drove down onto her foot with such force it also caved in an escalator step, putting the escalator out of commission for a week. It was unclear what happened to the woman’s foot.

Around noon, Mr. Brown stepped into his office to resolve some “nonconformities.”

Mr. Brown was an Army man for over a decade, and the military is famed for its layers and mazes of bureaucracy, but nothing in his experience compares with the amount of virtual paperwork involved in managing a subway station.

Every physical defect discovered across the 827,000 square feet under his domain, from a burned-out bulb to a broken-down elevator, is known as a nonconformity and entered into the enterprise asset management system — E.A.M. for short — where it is assigned to the appropriate division or divisions for repair and tracked through its eventual resolution.

Customer complaints, of which there are many, are tracked in a different system, C.R.M. (customer relationship management). Then there are the unusual occurrences, or U.O.’s. Like the military, the M.T.A. is fond of abbreviations and acronyms.

Mr. Brown’s office is on the mezzanine level, behind one of those scuffed off-white doors found throughout the subway system that bear cryptic inscriptions like “Access to Condulets” or “General Orders and Diversions.”

His just says “Station Dept.,” with a phone number, and “CAUTION Watch for opening door.”

Inside, the cinder-block walls are a sunless yellow. The closest thing to décor is a mirror propped against an air purifier on top of a file cabinet. A sticker on the mirror says, “Meet the person most responsible for your safety.”

Mr. Brown fired up E.A.M. on his computer. One of his phones rang. It was a quality assurance inspector — a Q.A.I. — whose job involves scouring the subways for nonconformities. He was calling about a loose handrail on a stairwell at Carroll Street station.

“I’ve already sent it over for my maintenance team to address,” Mr. Brown told the inspector.

“That’s a Priority One defect,” he said after he hung up. “Anything that causes a safety hazard to the public is a Priority One call and must be fixed within 24 hours.” Elsewhere at Carroll Street, on stairway S4 to be precise, there was a chipped nosing — a little piece of a stair tread missing. That was a Priority Three and could wait.

Another call came in about the handrail, then a call about an emergency-exit gate at Fort Hamilton Parkway with a nonoperative magnet.

Even the people who fix the subway create new nonconformities — power-wash cleaners who blast the decals off guideway strips for the visually impaired, work crews who cut holes in ceilings and leave them unfilled.

Mr. Brown pulled up a page on E.A.M. listing open jobs. “One large portion of full tiles missing from bottom of tiles column.” “Northbound platform refuse room 1 light out.” “Hanging Do Not Enter Tracks sign.” There were many more pages.

He pulled up a page of his K.P.I.’s — key performance indicators. It showed 144 “open station maintenance nonconformities” spread across his 23 stations. “These numbers are good,” Mr. Brown said — only five or six per station.

“At Jay Street,” he said, “I’ve got 10 open work orders. That’s really good. When I first came here there was about 100.”

Across the subway system, Mr. Brown and his 21 fellow G.S.M.s have resolved more than 62,000 issues since the M.T.A. created the position as part of the effort to reverse the subway’s yearslong descent into dysfunction.

Mr. Brown said he got out of defense work because “I got tired of seeing videos of death — terrorists blowing up this guy this way and killing that guy another way.” In 2016, he worked the Chelsea bombing in Manhattan. “That was a very long day,” he said.

When he heard about the subway job, he jumped on it: “I wanted to change from a career working behind the scenes to protect the public to interfacing with the public on a day-to-day basis.” Group station managers are the people whose smiling faces adorn the posters in every station that say, “I’m so-and-so Your Group Station Manager.” Mr. Brown is occasionally recognized when he goes to the Starbucks by the Fourth Avenue/Ninth Street station.

After lunch, Mr. Brown made field visits. It had been a rough few days at the 18th Avenue station in Kensington. A disturbed man had rampaged through the station smashing every overhead fluorescent light on the mezzanine. He did the same at Fort Hamilton Parkway and Church Avenue stations. The next day he returned to 18th Avenue and repeated the performance.

“Keep in mind I just had people repair 18th Avenue the day before,” Mr. Brown said. “Because it’s a light-out condition, that’s a Priority 1 emergency call. I had to burn overtime for that.”

At 18th Avenue, an elevated station where the columns are clad in incongruous wood paneling, Mr. Brown got a chance to interface with the public: two bleary-eyed men who sat on the ground beside the heater. Mr. Brown turned suddenly stern.

“This is not a place to hang out and get drunk!” he barked. One of the men slurred questioningly in Spanish.

“Why? Because customers are coming through here,” Mr. Brown said. “If you don’t want to listen to me, the N.Y.P.D. is on the way.” The men slunk off up the stairs like shamed dogs.

Mr. Brown said they would take the train one stop, turn around, and return. He said the men routinely harassed female passengers and used the station as a toilet.

On the ceiling of the mezzanine, a few light bulbs were missing. Mr. Brown took photos to document.

Right in front of the turnstiles, a pipe in the ceiling dripped steadily. Someone had put a bucket beneath it, lined with a garbage bag and half full already. Another nonconformity.

“What I’m going to do,” Mr. Brown said, “is find out who’s working on this.”