ST. LOUIS — The blue line is back starting next week in the St. Louis area.
The flash flooding that hit St. Louis during the last week of July caused damage to many MetroLink services. The flooding took out MetroLink service which has slowly been repaired these past few weeks.
Starting Monday, Aug. 22 Metro Transit is bringing the Blue Line back online. Trains will have to use a modified single-track operation due to signal houses that were taken out by the flood are still on the repair to-do list. Due to single tracking, there will be a roughly 20-minute delay, similar to pre-flooding regular weekend service.
“It is truly remarkable that I can say less than 4 weeks after we experienced this historic rainfall and devastating flash flooding event, that both Blue Line and Red Line trains will be serving the Forest Park-DeBaliviere Station and all of the MetroLink stations on the light rail system,” Taulby Roach Bi-State Development President and CEO said. “That is nothing short of amazing and it shows you how determined and talented our transit team is about restoring service for our MetroLink customers in the St. Louis region.”
Every station will have the blue line service.
Delays can still be expected between Forest Park-DeBaliviere and Delmar Loop for the Red Line...for the Blue Line, Forest Park-DeBaliviere and Big Bend.
The elevators at the Forest Park-DeBaliviere station were overtaken by floodwaters in July and will need to be fully replaced, no word on when they will run again.
Repairs will come at an updated cost of $40 million. The reason for the nearly doubling of repair costs is because they want to rebuild stronger, so flash flooding events don't choke the Metrolink again.
"Projecting about 40-million dollars which will come through conduit funding, through FEMA to FTA," Roach told 5 On Your Side, "but we do have insurance in place through Lloyds of London, a catastrophic policy that has a limit of 25-million. So we do expect the 40 million to be offset through our insurance revenue."
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