by JONATHAN LEMIRE, PAUL COLFORD and PETE DONOHUE
A smoky blaze in a busy Manhattan subway station halted service on seven train lines for hours yesterday, turning ordinary morning commutes into an agonizing mess.
Hundreds of thousands of riders were delayed by the electrical fire at the W. Fourth St. station in Greenwich Village - and many straphangers feared a terror attack was to blame because crackling announcements referred to a "smoke condition" but offered no other details.
"I have some butterflies," said Melissa Birnbaum, a 31-year-old Manhattan teacher. "You get freaked out when you hear there's smoke in a station.
"It's that sense of fear, especially if you were here on 9/11," Birnbaum said at Columbus Circle after learning her A train would not continue going downtown. "It brings back that feeling of 'Oh, my God. Did the terrorists blow something up?'"
The 8 a.m. blaze injured 13 firefighters who suffered minor injuries, and several of the city's Bravest quietly grumbled that it took the Transit Authority about 40 minutes to turn off power on the electrified third rail, delaying efforts to douse the flames.
TA President Lawrence Reuter said the third-rail power was kept on so trains could pull into stations and let out passengers.
No riders were injured, but the underground fire, which damaged transit worker offices and storage areas in the Greenwich Village station, left straphangers stranded.
All service was suspended on the B, C and V lines. No trains ran along the A and D lines between Columbus Circle and downtown Brooklyn, and E trains sat idle at the line's stations on the east side of Manhattan.
No F trains were entering Manhattan, and the line was running in only part of Brooklyn.
Felix Serrano, 19, a salesman from upper Manhattan, was desperate to get to work in Newark, but could not cram onto several jammed downtown No. 1 trains.
"I don't feel too good," he said. "With all of the stuff going on with terrorism, this would be a great time to set something off really bad."
The most anxiety was felt by riders stuck on trains stopped between stations for long periods of time before service returned to normal at 12:15 p.m.
Courtney Bagliardo was trapped for more than an hour on a C train beneath the East River.
"There was a policeman on board and he came around asking, 'Is everybody okay? Does anyone need an ambulance?'" she said. "But where was he going to get an ambulance under the East River?"
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