Holding true to it’s word, Metro announced at a press conference that it would indeed be re-opening Thursday morning at 5:00 am after a shutdown that lasted all of Wednesday. The shutdown was announced late Tuesday afternoon, and took many by surprise as this is the first time such an event has occurred in Metro’s 36 year history.

The decision to close Metro for an entire day came after smoke was detected on the tracks early Monday morning. By Tuesday, Metro had determined that emergency inspections were needed to prevent a repeat of the 2015 fire that lead to one death.

According to Metor General Manager Paul Wiedefeld, work crews spent all of Wednesday inspecting 22 zones which lead to the finding of 26 defects. As of now, 18 of those have been repaired and the remaining should be repaired by tonight. Wiedefeld added that if these defects were not repaired on time or other problems were detected, then the solution would simply be single tracking or bus bridges in between stations.

A diagram pulled up at the press conference showed three red squares which marked areas that Metro could not safely run trains over until any defects were repaired. In addition, the diagram showed six yellow circles which marked other areas that were in need of repair as well.

A video that was also presented appeared to show footage of one of the damaged jumper cables where wires could be seen protruding out of the sides.

Wiedefeld admitted that as of now, Metro has still not identified the cause behind this problem however their main priority at the moment was to get the entire system running again by 5:00 am on Thursday morning. At the time of the press conference, only 10-14% of the system had not yet been inspected.