Contractors worked through the night to stop a flood after cement was accidentally poured into a Victoria Line control room.
Contractors bought sugar from supermarkets to help prevent the cement from flooding in. For all of you who don’t know, sugar is known as a ‘cement destroyer’ and delays cement from hardening.
Victoria Line services from Brixton to Warren Street were suspended overnight but have now reopened.
News of the flood broke after a worker posted photos of the leak.
A worker told the Standard: “The only word for it is a f*** up of major proportions. Everyone was f-ing and blinding when they realised what had happened.
“It was knee-deep in the signal room swamping all the relay equipment and it’s going to be very, very expensive to repair because it was all brand new.”
Peter McNaught, operations director for the Bakerloo, Central and Victoria lines, said: “Our engineers have worked tirelessly through the night and have successfully repaired the damaged signalling equipment. A good service is now operating across the Victoria line.
“We again apologise to our customers who were affected by yesterday’s disruption.”
A spokesman for the RMT union said yesterday: “We understand that a foot of concrete burst into the control room, having been poured into an escalator void.
“We await further information but what we do know is that LU technicians are on site now, working flat out to clear up the mess and get services back on line, proving once again that it’s directly-employed public sector staff who are needed to deal with this kind of emergency, making a nonsense of Boris Johnson’s Tube staff cuts plans.”
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