BART control center goes dark, causing hours-long train stoppage

SAN FRANCISCO - BART train service was delayed by four hours on Friday morning due to a computer networking problem, sending crews to scramble to fix the issue and passengers to find other ways to get home, work and the airport. 

BART control center goes dark

What we know:

The news crippled the system and was such a big deal that even the New York Times sent a breaking news alert about the stoppage. 

All BART trains resumed service at 9:15 a.m., but because of delays, the damage for commuters had already been done. 

In an interview with KTVU after the chaos had calmed down, BART spokeswoman Alicia Trost explained what happened.

The normal maintenance overnight shift occurred, and the morning crew started to fire up the control center. 

But it was quickly "evident things were not powering up as they usually do," Trost said. "The issue was, the staff at the control center could not see the board." 

That board shows the track circuits.

"Without that visibility, we won't run the trains," she said. "The network devices were not communicating with each other."

Eventually, crews were able to do a "hard reset," Trost said, and the devices started to come back up.

Trost insisted there was no evidence of outside forces at work. 

And at this point, she said, it's not clear why the issue occurred, or even if it's because the networking devices might be old.

She urged people to support not only BART, but bus and ferry service as well, because all these public transit agencies are needed in such a large region. 

System-wide outage frustrates commuters

BART carries an average of 140,000 passengers on a typical Friday. 

The system-wide shutdown was first reported at 4:25 a.m., about a half hour before trains should have started running at 5 a.m., an hour when many people are starting to head home from overnight shifts or heading out to begin their work days. 

"It's frustrating for folks," BART spokesman Chris Filippi told KTVU. "And we know we're disappointing a lot of folks. We apologize for that. This is an anomaly for us, but we know that it doesn't help people today." 

And many people needed that help. 

Hundreds of people hopped on buses, many hailed rideshares and others simply went home. 

At about 5:15 a.m., Sean and Irie Siegert turned around from the BART station in Walnut Creek and jumped into an Uber to get to the airport. 

"He gasped, very loud," Irie Siegert said. "I've never seen this before."

Sean Siegert said it would have been nice to get a notification before he left his house. 

"This is going to be a huge monkey wrench on my day, for sure," he said. 

Brad Powell said he was heading to take a test for a job, which he might not get now.

"I could lose a job over it," he said. 

Paul Lew said he took a bus from Vallejo to Walnut Creek and then took BART to Oakland. After all that, he had to take the bus back home to start his commute all over again.

He planned to take AC Transit into Oakland, and he prayed that the BART trains would be running by the time he got to El Cerrito. 

Others said they were just going to turn around and go home. 

Justin Levias was one of those passengers. He was trying to get from the Embarcadero BART station in San Francisco to Richmond and was prepared to spend $50 on Uber. 

"I gotta pay money to get home," he said. "I gotta do what I gotta do." 

Omar Rogers said he was thinking of calling it a day, before his day even began.

"Ugh man," he said. "I'm ready to just call in and say I'm not coming into work."

The transit agency's team of engineers were able to identify and isolate a redundant sector of the network that caused the intermittent visibility and disconnected it. This allowed service to begin. The East Bay section of the BART system began running passenger trains first, shortly before 9am, and systemwide service began just before 9:30am.

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