A water pipe burst in the tunnel of the Moscow metro's Dark Blue Line — on which a deadly derailment occurred last week — splashing passengers with dirty water through open train windows, officials and witnesses said.
The pipe running through the tunnel and used "for technical purposes" burst Thursday morning near the tracks between the Park Pobedy and Kievskaya stations, the metro said in a statement. Park Pobedy was the nearest station to the site of the July 15 derailment that claimed 23 lives.
Metro technicians turned off the water flow within four minutes and were scheduled to replace some of the pipes and connections, the statement said, adding that service on the line was not interrupted.
But witnesses gave a different account of the incident.
One subway passenger told NTV television that soaked people were disembarking from one train after another as they pulled into a station, and tried to seek explanations from metro staff.
"I was first, [then] they started to get off the next trains, approaching the station manager, everybody dirty, soaked with water mixed with dirt," the man told NTV. "Couldn't understand what happened."
Another passenger complained about the apparent indifference of metro officials to the incident.
"The only thing that the station head could say was that we, those affected, would be able to find a metro administrator in charge of this line at the Prospekt Mira station after noon," the passenger told NTV. "That's how our metro treats passengers."
A Twitter user wrote on his microblog: "Trains are flooded from the top by either water or dirt. Water in train light fixtures. Horrible."
Another passenger told Ekho Moskvy radio that people traveling to work in the morning were drenched in dirty water.
The metro added in its statement that it apologized for the "inconvenience."
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