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CBS2 Exclusive: Subway Riders Want To Know What's Being Done To Repair Crumbling Stations

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – A subway station ceiling collapse left a woman injured and other commuters on edge this week in Brooklyn.

Now they're wondering what will be done to prevent this from happening again.

CBS2's Reena Roy took those concerns to the head of the New York City Transit Authority to find out.

"I start feeling stuff hitting the back of my head and my shoulders. Then all of a sudden, it's over," the victim, 27-year-old Molly Scott, told CBS2's Ali Bauman in an exclusive interview. "If I had been in a slightly different location, I might not be talking to you."

"What bothers me is some little kid could be going to school tomorrow, and some ceiling could drop on their head and they could die," she added.

CBS2 found pretty bad conditions at some of the busiest stations in the city, including 14th Street and Sixth Avenue. Video shows decaying and missing tiles and what appears to be water stains. Across the platform, there's crumbling paint on the ceiling.

More: CBS2 Exclusive: Woman Hurt When Subway Station Ceiling Collapsed Wants To See Changes

Transit Authority President Andy Byford told Roy "I don't need to be convinced."

"My message to New Yorkers is: We're on this, we need to get on with modernizing all the stations," he added.

Byford said while the cause of the collapse at Borough Hall is still under investigation, the station did have prior water damage and was already slated to be fully renovated next year in a $43 million project.

When asked why it wasn't done earlier to prevent the collapse, he replied, "At the end of the day, you can't do all of the stations at once."

Stations are inspected annually. Byford hopes to fix 150 of them in the next five years.

In the meantime, Borough Hall has been deemed safe and engineers are checking the structure of other, older locations to make sure this doesn't happen again.

Since the state runs the subways and trains, CBS2 did request an interview with Gov. Andrew Cuomo, but a spokesperson referred us back to the MTA.

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