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Verizon Works 'Round The Clock' On Dead N.Y. Phone Lines
NEW YORK, NEW YORK, 13 Sep 2001 -- Verizon Communications [NYSE:VZ] today continued its struggle to reestablish phone service to about 200,000 customers in lower Manhattan in the wake of the massive terrorist strikes on the World Trade Center.
Five of Verizon's 19 central offices in New York's financial district were affected by the disaster, a company spokeswoman told Newsbytes today. The facility worst hit was the one at 140 West Street, adjacent to the Building 7 of the World Trade Center complex, which collapsed shortly after the center's twin towers toppled.
Massive, tumbling steel beams falling from the collapsing 110-story north tower of the World Trade Center smashed through large portions of Verizon's West Street offices, the company said. In addition to the structural damage, the building's five-level basement filled with water, causing further telephone line outages, the company said. Dust, dirt and other debris that poured over everything in the area also is affecting computer systems in the parts of the building that were not crushed, the company said.
Meanwhile, the company told National Public Radio this evening, the mass of rubble layering the streets around the blast zone is concealing manholes, making it impossible for workers to attend to underground phone lines, which may have been damaged in the earthquake-like shockwave created when the towers crashed to earth.
The calamity took out service to 200,000 Verizon voice-service customers in New York's financial district, while also blacking out the equivalent of 3 million data lines, said Susan Butta, a Verizon spokeswoman in Washington, D.C. The disaster, a company official said Wednesday, happened in what "is probably the most telecommunications-intensive area in the world."
"The work that we have to do here, I think, is just enormous," Verizon President and Vice Chairman Larry Babbio said in conference call with reporters Wednesday. If there is a bright side it is this - and it's not much: Babbio said most of the 200,000 dead phone lines are in homes and businesses that have been forced to evacuate, and the customers affected probably are unaware that they have no phone service.
Another Verizon facility, on nearby Broad Street, also sustained significant damage in the collapse of the trade center towers, but it was operating Wednesday afternoon at 80 percent capacity; no update on service from that location was available Thursday afternoon.
Verizon's Broad Street facility supplies about 80 percent of the private phone service to the New York Stock Exchange, which is slated to open for business along with the rest of the U.S. financial markets Monday morning.
The West Street office supplied about 20 percent of the NYSE's service. There appears to be little hope of powering up that facility by Monday, but the company said it is working to route service around the partially smashed West Street building to get the NYSE up to full communications strength.
Butta said the company had a switch in the south tower and a remote switch facility in the north tower of the trade center, both of which obviously were lost. But their destruction had little affect on the rest of New York's financial district, since they mostly served the towers themselves, Butta said. Verizon also had sales offices in the trade center.
Butta said that Verizon's land-line telephone service is all that remains affected by the disaster. "The Verizon online network was operating fine," Butta said. "The Verizon wireless network did lose some facilities at the World Trade Center just like the land-line company did. But they have put up temporary antennae."
Butta said that wireless call volumes actually were higher than normal today, up even from Wednesday. Nine out of ten cell sites that were knocked out of service Tuesday morning are back up now, she said.
In Wednesday's conference call, Babbio also mentioned that Verizon's service to the Pentagon, which like the trade center was blasted by a hijacked jetliner, is operating mostly uninterrupted. Service is out in areas directly adjacent to the impact site, he said, but switching equipment in the U.S. militarys' nerve center went undamaged by the crash, or by subsequent fires.
In a grim reminder of the human stakes involved, Larry Babbio said that Verizon had 488 workers in the two towers of the World Trade Center. He said, that "one or two were missing."
"We're still in the process of trying to contact several of them," Butta acknowleged today. "Of course, we're hoping for the best."
Audibly choking back his emotions during the phone conference Wednesday, Babbio said that "a number of employees" at Genuity Inc., a company affiliated with Verizon, were trapped near the top of one of the towers. "They called us from the roof, or were on their way to the roof yesterday morning," Babbio said, "because they couldn't get out any other way."
As rescuers pick through the wreckage looking for both survivors and the dead, Butta said Verizon is helping by making 5,000 phones available for rescue workers on the scene. The company also has installed hundreds of emergency phone lines at the New York Police Department and in other locations to facilitate emergency communications at ground zero of the disaster. Verizon is online at http://www.verizon.com
Reported by Newsbytes.com, http://www.newsbytes.com .
19:23 CST
Reposted 22:31 CST
(20010913/WIRES TOP, ONLINE, LEGAL, BUSINESS/VERIZON/PHOTO)
Kevin Featherly, a former managing editor at Washington Post Newsweek Interactive, is a Minnesota journalist who covers politics and technology. He has authored or contributed to five previous books, Guide to Building a Newsroom Web Site (1998), The Wired Journalist (1999), Elements of Language (2001), Pop Music and the Press (2002) and Encyclopedia of New Media (2003). His byline has appeared in Editor & Publisher, the San Francisco Chronicle, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Online Journalism Review and Minnesota Law and Politics, among other publications. In 2000, he was a media coordinator for Web, White & Blue, the first online presidential debates.
Copyright 2004, by Kevin Featherly