An electrical cable appears to be the source of a fire reported near Foggy Bottom that halted Metrorail service between the McPherson Square and Clarendon stations for hours Thursday morning, Metro’s general manager said.
Commuters faced heavy delays Thursday with service suspended on the Orange, Blue and Silver lines as officials responded to reports of a fire just before 6:30 a.m., the transit agency said.
Metro General Manager Randy Clarke said crews will need time to repair the cable that “flared up.”
“I got caught in this disruption as well & fully acknowledge that service in this area has not been good enough lately,” Clarke wrote in a post on X, while apologizing to customers.
The Foggy Bottom station reopened just after 8:30 a.m. and Metro said service is back to normal. Trains are no longer single tracking.
There are no reports of injuries.
One rider, Uneida Erving, told WTOP’s Kyle Cooper that she was “glad they kicked us off before we went towards the fire.” She started at Vienna and had to switch trains at Eastern Market.
“That train brought us to McPherson Square, and they kicked us off at McPherson Square and said, ‘It’s a fire up ahead. Y’all get off,'” Erving said. “No shuttle busses are really around. So we’re just hitchhiking from point A to point B.”
“I was like, ‘What if the fire’s between Rosslyn and a Foggy Bottom?’ I can’t swim,” she said.
WTOP’s Will Vitka and Jessica Kronzer contributed to this story. WTOP’s Kyle Cooper reported live from Foggy Bottom.
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