Kind of disconcerting to learn that the Roosevelt Island tram’s emergency backup system has been out of service for months. Nice going, NYC. This from the New York Times:

A day after the Roosevelt Island Tramway stalled in midair, trapping dozens of passengers for as long as 11 hours, officials said that a backup power system designed to restart the two tram cars in seconds had been out of service for months

That disclosure came as the tram remained shut down yesterday, after an improvised rescue effort that freed the last of 20 passengers stranded in a tram car 200 feet above the East Side of Manhattan. By then, after 4 a.m., 48 other passengers trapped in a tram car above the East River had already been evacuated, bringing to an end to a late-afternoon tram ride that had turned into a nightlong ordeal.

As relieved passengers recounted how they had passed the hours — chatting, telling jokes and calling family and friends on cellphones — officials began investigating why the incident had forced the police and emergency teams to devise an evacuation plan on the spot.

And as the state-appointed official who oversees Roosevelt Island defended the tram as "an intimate part of the Roosevelt Island mystique," Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg gave it a less-than-enthusiastic endorsement: The subway, he said, was a faster way to travel to and from the island. It was not clear yesterday how long the tram would be closed.

The Swiss-made tramway, which went into operation in 1976, stalled when a power surge knocked out three giant fuses that control the flow of power to the tram cars. It was not clear why the fuses could not simply be replaced and the tramway restarted. But the tramway also has a diesel-powered system that can run the gears and cables and make the cars go.

Herbert E. Berman, the president of the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation, the state agency that manages the 147-acre island, said the backup system was removed for repairs last fall on orders of the State Department of Labor, the agency responsible for inspecting the tramway. He also said the system was not required, but inspectors said that if it was going to be used, it had to work.

But he said the surge that knocked out the main system could have disabled the secondary power system as well. He said it was expected to be returned and re-installed in a matter of weeks.

So rescuers assembled a cagelike rescue basket that had been stored on Roosevelt Island, but never used in a real emergency, to carry the passengers to safety from the tram car over the East River. But the rescuers improvised a way to carry the people in the second tram car to safety after realizing that otherwise they would have to wait until the first evacuation had been completed.

Mr. Berman said that in the tramway’s 30 years, emergency procedures had never been needed before. "That’s a pretty good record," he said. The rescue, he added, "was a tedious process, but it was a safe process."

The mayor said the rescue effort had "worked perfectly."

"It was a classic operation of this city," he told reporters at Fire Department headquarters in Brooklyn, "and it showed that all of these people worked together. We did what we had to do; we got everybody down safely."

Mr. Bloomberg said it took so long to evacuate the two tram cars "because our emergency response people did exactly what they should do."

"They didn’t rush to do anything just to satisfy a beat-the-clock kind of exercise," he said.

And, as other officials noted yesterday, when the tram stopped about 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Fire Department workers who arrived at the scene believed that the power would go back on quickly. For that reason, department personnel who had been trained to rescue passengers from the tram were sent to other duties.

In fact, the power did come on again, at about 8:15. The two tram cars moved about 75 feet, only to grind to a halt again.

That was when the Police Department’s emergency service unit took over. Officers from that unit had been working on a rescue plan just in case, and at 8:30 they decided to go ahead with it.

They started with the tram car on the Roosevelt Island side because it was carrying more passengers. After the basket was assembled at the end of the tramway, about a dozen officers and firefighters — who by then had returned to the scene — climbed in to test how much it could hold.

By then it was almost 11 p.m., and the passengers had been stuck for six hours. Four officers, all trained as emergency medical technicians, rode out in the cage…