CHENNAI: It was a shocking surprise for Metro commuters who landed at the Nandanam station on Wednesday evening. Though the public addressing system at the station was continuously making emergency evacuation announcement, instructing all to vacate immediately, staff manning the exits refused to allow the passengers to leave.“It is a false alarm sir, please wait near the counter until we restore the system,” a female staff said. Pointing to the automatic fare collection (AFC) gates which are wide open in view of the emergency announcement, the staff explained that the passengers cannot mark their exit as the gates are already open and fare would not be deducted from the prepaid cards.As more trains crossed the station and the staff were trying to put of the announcement, a crowd of about 30 passengers were made to wait near the exit gates. After few minutes, they were instructed to proceed towards another counter near the post office entrance.An employee checked each passenger boarding station through their prepaid cards. She then asked the passengers to pay the fare in cash. Only after such payment, each passenger was permitted to leave the station.A metro rail official said one of the fire emergency alarms was falsely triggered opening the AFC gates for evacuation. It is at the AFC gates that commuters swipe their smartcard and pay for the commute before exiting a station. Cmrl has launched an inquiry to find out the reason that led to the false alarm.“The station controller realised it is a false alarm and instead of letting the passengers go, which is what we would do in case of a real emergency, we stopped them and manually collected the ticket fare,” a metro rail official said. “A team will investigate what triggered the alarm.”Officials said it was not the first time that alarms got triggered falsely. “When civil or maintenance work happens at a station, dust gets settled in these alarms triggering them at times,” an official said.

Stay updated with all the Chennai Latest News headlines here. For more exclusive & live news updates from all around India, stay connected with NYOOOZ.