Early Tuesday morning vandals in New York went on a spree of destruction that lasted a full day, smashing 97 windows on MTA trains. The damage was so bad that five subway lines were impacted and one wasn’t able to fully return to service until Wednesday evening.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority said 97 windows were broken across 45 trains. By 11 a.m. on Wednesday, crews had fixed 25 of the trains. M.T.A. officials estimated the costs of the damage at about $500,000.

Richard Davey, the president of New York City Transit, said during a news conference on Wednesday that the windows had been broken by “criminals.” He said that he was outraged because of the strain the vandalism was placing on the city during a busy period of travel with students recently back in school.

Repair crews rushed to replace the damaged windows but they didn’t have enough spares and had to start taking windows out of trains which were out of service.

“We literally have exhausted, depending on the fleet class, the number of windows in our supply and are now stealing windows off of [subway] cars that are in our train yard,” Richard Davey, the president of New York City Transit, said Wednesday at the Whitehall Street station in Lower Manhattan. “So that gives you a sense for how acute this issue is.”

Police said windows on trains along the N, Q, W and B, D and F lines were smashed as vandals inflicted the heaviest toll on subway train glass in more than three years, when, according to MTA data, there were 104 incidents of vandalism on trains in a single week in August 2020.

Authorities say they still don’t know where this damage happened and are working to determine that. But given the number of cameras available to them, they expect to be able to identify those responsible. They will be charged with felonies because of the amount of damage invovled.

“I often say we don’t get it perfect at New York City Transit — we try like heck — but yesterday, to have, as I said, a group of individuals or individual disrupt the commute of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, and probably cost tens of thousands, if not more, dollars to repair these windows is outrageous,” Davey said, before promising to bring those responsible to justice.

“I don’t know of a place that has more cameras than a Las Vegas casino than we do. We will find you. We have your picture, I have no doubt. We will prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law,” Davey added.

Davey, the transit chief, did make it clear in response to questions that all of the damage happened from the inside of the trains. Someone or a group of people just walked through and smashed nearly every window along the way. Asked why the person or persons weren’t stopped if they were doing this inside the trains, authorities didn’t have an answer.

My own guess is because witnesses were terrified. It’s doubtful whoever was responsible was doing this with their bare hands. It’s more likely this is someone walking through the trains with a hammer or other weapon.

Prior to this week there had been 214 incidents of glass-smashing on the New York subway system which was down compared to the 326 incidents last year. But in just 24 hours this year’s numbers have nearly caught up.

So at this point your guess is as good as mine. Is this a homeless person out of his mind on drugs or some left-wing anarchist trying to bring down the system? What’s sort of worrisome is that, if that was the goal, they partly succeeded. It wouldn’t take a very large crew of nuts to shut down the entire city’s transportation system with nothing more than a few hammers.