I don’t know about you, but the last place I want to be trapped after enduring a grueling workday is the NYC subway. Unfortunately for many hard-working commuters, this was the case yesterday evening.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) experienced a power outage during rush hour on Wednesday, leaving 3,500 people stranded on the subway for hours. The outage occurred around 5:30 pm between the Jay Street/MetroTech and Hoyt-Schermerhorn stations and ended up stranding two F trains during a heavy rainstorm. Passengers were trapped in the trains without Wi-Fi, cell service, or air conditioning for over two hours.

And trust me, as an ex-NYC subway commuter myself, I can assure you those stranded trains were disgustingly hot and humid with little airflow. If you have claustrophobia, consider this your worst nightmare.

“Some people were kind of losing it,” Anders Nelson, one of the commuters, told Gothamist. “Calling the conductor on the little call box and asking all these questions. The conductor kept coming on every 20 minutes or so and just saying there’s a power outage, we can’t move, we don’t have AC, they’re working on it.”

As time passed without any changes, the situation began to escalate.

“People were peeing in between the cars,” Nelson said. “People were passing out cookies. It became a little community thing.”
Eventually, members of the New York City Fire Department (NYFD) rescued the individuals and guided them out through the subway’s service stairways.
“We thank the hundreds of transit workers, firefighters, NYPD officers and responders from other agencies who worked to quickly assist riders on two trains stuck between stations following a Con Ed power failure,” NYC Transit president Demetrius Crichlow said in a statement. “Fortunately, evacuations were orderly and there appear to be no serious injuries.”