MBTA General Manager Phil Eng said the agency will replace significant portions of a cable that came down inside a Blue Line tunnel under Boston Harbor Tuesday, forcing the evacuation of more than 450 passengers.
Speaking at a ribbon-cutting for a revamped commuter rail station in Winchester on Wednesday, Eng said a section of the 50- to 60-year-old steel cable fell onto a separate communication cable, prompting trains to stop and T workers to evacuate passengers back through the tunnel to the Blue Line’s Aquarium station.
“In an underground environment, a damp environment, when you think about a cable that is 60 years old, perhaps, it probably just over the years of being there finally weakened to the point where it came down,” said Eng.
“What we’re going to do is go back in over the next few nights and permanently replace significant sections of this cable to ensure that the future reliability, particularly in a hard accessible area like under the harbor, is addressed now,” he said, noting that the MBTA is also examining infrastructure needs across the entirety of its system.
The T leader has been working to revamp the transit agency since taking over as general manager in April 2023, and riders have credited him with making important progress.
It took firefighters approx. 1 hr to evacuate 500 people from a @MBTA Blue Line train that was disabled under the harbor between Maverick & Aquarium station. They used the Nolan cart to transport anyone needing assistance using 3 exits , 2 in Boston & 1 in East Boston pic.twitter.com/8fYoSYLJHJ
— Boston Fire Dept. (@BostonFire) July 15, 2025
But the Blue Line evacuation left many rattled, and brought to mind an incident on the Orange Line in July 2022, prior to Eng’s tenure, when passengers escaped a train that caught fire on a bridge over the Mystic River.
Eng credited the operator of the Blue Line train with handling Tuesday’s situation appropriately.
“I want to give them a lot of credit for seeing the cable that was down, because safety is still our top priority,” said Eng. “They did exactly as they should do. They stopped the train.”
Eng also credited T staffers with carrying out an orderly evacuation amid challenging conditions. And he apologized to riders.
“These are not the things that they expect, and we don’t expect that is the level of service we want to provide,” said Eng. “In fact, these are the things why the investment in our infrastructure, the need to accelerate work, is such a priority.”
Produced with assistance from the Public Media Journalists Association Editor Corps funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.
