Hunks of metal fall from Queens subway tracks, almost hit woman

NEW YORK (FOX 5 NY) - Erin Koster, a mother of two young children, was on her way to an eye doctor appointment on Monday evening when two metal chunks fell from the No. 7 elevated subway line on Roosevelt Avenue at 53rd Street in Woodside, Queens.

Thankfully, the metal didn't hit Koster but the pieces came very close. She said that the train passed overhead and then the pieces fell right into the middle of the street.

"At some point, it's going to come down on someone's head," Koster told FOX 5 NY. 

Koster tweeted photos of the debris and her outrage and tagged the MTA and city officials, including City Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer, who has taken the MTA to task about several incidents of debris falling from the No. 7 line. This is the fifth time dangerous debris has fallen from the line since February, Van Bramer said.

In one case, a chunk of wood pierced the windshield of an SUV. In another, a metal chunk smashed into a car.

Van Bramer has been asking New York City Transit President Andy Byford since February to put up netting to catch the falling debris. Byford recently sent Van Bramer a letter saying that netting would "impede access, close-up inspection, and assessment of corrosion of defects on the structure, and cause extensive street level traffic disruption to install and secure."

But after five separate incidents, the MTA has had a change of heart and issued a statement on Monday saying that the problem has the "attention of the highest levels of MTA leadership."

"We are working to quickly put into place an initial deployment of netting to understand if it can be used to contain debris while also still providing enough visibility and access to perform regular inspections," the MTA's Shams Tarek said in the statement. "The 7 line has undergone multiple inspections of its structure in recent months, and the debris that was found today appears to have broken clean recently with no signs of slow deterioration or stress that would have been visible earlier."

"I'm not interested in us waiting for someone to get hurt or worse before we start to care about this," Koster said. "It's obviously a problem.