One Metro rider said they slipped and broke their wrist on the floor of a Metro station. Another said she slipped as she walked up a station escalator.
Washington, D.C
D.C.’s Metro is a slippery mess. Blame the wild weather.
Reports of widespread slipping over the past couple of days follow a week that began with 3 to 5 inches of snow on the ground and ended with 80-degree weather, the highest temperature observed in January in D.C. since record keeping began in 1872. It typically doesn’t get this hot until late March.
When Susan Burke, who has lived in D.C. for three years, slipped at the Federal Triangle station on her way to work Wednesday, she thought there was something wrong with her new shoes. She had to make “a very concerted effort to even move forward because it was so slippery,” she said.
But it couldn’t have been her shoes that made her slip, she thought; she had owned the same kind before. “Maybe I need to scuff them up outside first,” she pondered.
“And then I was inside work, and I wasn’t slipping anymore,” Burke said, deciding it had something to do with the Metro station. Her suspicions were largely confirmed when she saw online discussions of locals lamenting the same issue.
“This is an extremely unusual occurrence,” said Sherri Ly, a WMATA spokeswoman, in an email. While the region has faced heavy rain and snow many times before, the extreme swing in the weather has made conditions far worse, she said.
But this isn’t the first time transit riders have complained about slippery tiles. A rider sued WMATA after she slipped and fell on the floor tiles of the Archives Metro station in 2011. The case was settled out of court. Several months before that, Alexandria Mayor Bill Euille (D) slipped on a wet platform at the Braddock Road Metro station.
Metro began installing new subway tiles with small grooves in 2019 to capture water and make the surface less slippery in snow and rain.
“Our teams are monitoring conditions throughout the system, and staff are working to power wash, clean and dry floors,” Ly said. “We have also posted wet floor signs and are advising customers through social media, vehicle and station public address announcements to continue to use caution when entering, exiting or traversing through our stations and facilities.”
“Maybe,” Burke said, “they could put down a rug for people to wipe their feet.”