This has shaken me up.
On Friday, the MBTA released video footage of a ceiling panel falling and narrowly missing hitting a woman at the Harvard Square station on the Red Line. The incident happened during rush hour on Wednesday.
Cianna Navarro, a 21-year-old student at Suffolk University in Boston, is lucky to be alive. The ceiling panel in question weighed 25 pounds. Had she been there a split second earlier there's a good chance she wouldn't be here to tell her story.
I am shaken up because I frequently use Harvard station and have been up and down the steps where the panel fell hundreds of times. It could have been me to whom this happened and perhaps I wouldn't have been so lucky. But for the grace of G-d.....
For its part, MBTA engineers are going to remove those panels at the Harvard stop while inspecting other panels over the next several weeks. Notwithstanding these measures, a lot of MBTA passengers are going to be looking up the next time they take the T.
But ceilings are hardly the only problem when it comes to the MBTA. At Porter Square, the escalator is a constant problem. At any given moment, at least one of them is being repaired. I fear the kind of accident which occurred at Back Bay station on the Orange Line in December 2021 happening at Porter, but only on a much larger scale as these escalators are the longest in the entire system.
If there is any public work which needs federal infrastructure spending it is the MBTA. We can't have corroded ceiling panels full of water randomly falling on unsuspecting passengers.
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