Monorail again breaks down, stranding 25

Grace Murray Hopper, a Navy rear admiral, once said: "If you do something once, people call it an accident. If you do it twice, they call it a coincidence. But do it a third time, and you've just proven a natural law."

If Hopper is right, Seattle's 40-year-old Monorail system is on the verge of becoming more of an irritant than an icon.


		Loren Callahan / P-I
	Firefighters help Emi Horiaawa of Nagano, Japan, on the upper ladder, and Mary Perez of San Francisco down off the stalled Monorail yesterday.

For the second time in five days, one of the two elevated trains stalled yesterday morning, raising questions about the durability of the World's Fair relic.

The train first went kaput Sunday, at Fifth Avenue and Wall Street. Twenty-six passengers patiently waited for nearly an hour before the Fire Department came to the rescue.

It happened again yesterday -- with the same train -- shortly after 11 a.m., at Fifth Avenue and Broad Street, smack-dab between the Experience Music Project building and the Space Needle.

Just as on Sunday, the 25 passengers, all calm and smiling, were escorted down two 50-foot ladders by firefighters as bystanders heckled, "I'm never taking that thing again."

Sunday's breakdown was blamed on a burned-out compressor. Seattle Center spokesman Perry Cooper said yesterday's stall happened when a small part that connects the car to a high-voltage line broke off.

"Usually what happens is that it wears down and is replaced," Cooper said. But yesterday, the part "totally busted off, and it ended up stopping the power to the car."

The system should be up and running again by this morning, he said.

Unlike the loud hissing sound preceding Sunday's incident, passengers didn't hear a thing yesterday.

"No sound, it just stopped," said passenger Linda Pond of Flagstaff, Ariz.

"They sent in someone to try and fix it, and he was really nice," said Pond, 49. But after about 45 minutes, it became clear that the train had lost power.

Perry said that ordinarily when one of the trains breaks down, the other train is pulled up next to it on the parallel track. The doors of both trains are opened and passengers are led into the working one.

But the other train is still being serviced -- as was the case Sunday.

Passenger Reiko Sakakura, 32, a Japanese student visiting Seattle for the day from Vancouver, B.C., was "very surprised" when the train suddenly stopped.

"I was a little scared, but it was fun," Sakakura said with a giggle.

Seattle voters will be asked in November to pay for a 14-mile, $1.75 billion commuter monorail system. Monorail campaign Chairman Peter Sherwin said the old system's breakdowns shouldn't deter voters from backing the initiative.

"It's a coincidence that out of the nine times it's happened in 40 years, twice were this week," he said.

The monorail plan has budgeted money for an escape walkway, but proponents have not decided for sure whether to build it. Instead, Sherwin said, in the case of a breakdown, a second train could stop alongside the idled one on a second track to evacuate the riders by using a ramp.

Henry Aronson, chairman of the monorail opposition campaign, said breakdowns are a cause for concern.

"What happens if it's rush hour and the second train is full?" he asked.

P-I reporter D. Parvaz can be reached at 206-448-8095 or dparvaz@seattlepi.com P-I reporter Kery Murakami contributed to this report.

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