Published December 2001

Verizon at Ground Zero
Thousands of lines, millions of circuits
had to be repaired following Sept. 11 attacks

By John Wolcott
Herald Business Journal Editor

On Nov. 1, less than two months after terrorists used two sky-jacked airliners to destroy the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, Verizon Communications quietly announced it had restored 99 percent of the telecommunications system that was virtually wiped out in the attack.

Overseeing this uniquely challenging accomplishment — which is only a first step in a master recovery plan that envisions a year or more of work to complete a permanent new system — is an executive whose office windows once looked out on the modest skyline of Everett.

Today, less than two years after leaving her post as President of GTE Northwest to become President of National Operations for a new global telecommunications giant — Verizon Communications — Eileen Odum’s view encompasses the skyline of New York City.

That skyline changed Sept. 11 — and so did Odum’s life. Until recently, almost all of her time, resources and energy have been focused on returning service to normal, re-creating a sophisticated telecommunications network that took decades to build and only hours to erase.

Immediately after the attacks, all 56 Verizon buildings in New York City were evacuated and 13,843 workers were sent home as a safety measure. Then the restoration work began in earnest. The task was truly monumental.

“There were thousands of cables, both fiber and copper, serving the whole southern Manhattan area, including services to dozens of local wholesale customers with their own users. When the towers collapsed, several pieces of steel from the towers and an antenna on one of the towers came flying like javelins into our 140 West Street switching center across the street from the World Trade Center,” Odum said in a telephone interview from New York City.

The collapse of the trade center towers created gaping holes in the walls of Verizon’s telecommunications office, with one steel girder piercing through the sidewalk and into a cable vault in one of the building’s sub-basements.

The most important numbers to remember about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States are the 5,766 people who died at New York City’s World Trade Center, at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., on the ground during the collapse of the Twin Towers and aboard the four destroyed airliners. With so many people still missing, even that number is not exact.

But there are other significant numbers that describe the impact of the attacks, less personal but still descriptive of what happened in New York City that day.

Officials at Verizon, the local phone company for New York City, estimate the terrorist disaster destroyed more than 200,000 voice lines, 100,000 business lines, 3.6 million data circuits and 10 cellular towers.

What telecommunications infrastructure at Ground Zero wasn’t destroyed by the explosive fireball of the two fuel-bloated airliners flown into the towers by the terrorists was rendered useless by the fiery collapse of the two towers, the later collapse of Building No. 7 of the trade center complex, the fine dust that floated through broken windows and gaping holes in the switching center’s walls or water from fire hoses.

“I’ve been on all of what we consider to be major outages in the Northwest,” said Ken Maas of Silver Lake, a Verizon Lynnwood office employee sent to New York City for his expertise in restoring service in emergency situations. “I couldn’t even imagine the amount of cables that are here (in New York City). We’re doing a lot of out-of-the-box thinking. Whatever it takes: It works here; it doesn’t work there. Let’s put something in between to temporarily get it out.”

Working around-the-clock shifts, Verizon employees spent nearly two months “putting something in between” to temporarily restore service, including running cables through windows and holes in the walls, down the sides of buildings and along the sidewalk and into manholes where they are connected to underground networks of wires.

With emergency staffing, 3,000 Verizon technicians and managers went to work in the disaster area and throughout lower Manhattan to restore phone service, with 800 of those workers dedicated to getting the company’s wholesale clients and their customers back on line.

Miraculously, Verizon’s 911 emergency service network remained intact, Odum said. But there were plenty of other problems to work on.

As the world watched, Verizon workers rushed to get the New York Stock Exchange back on line, including its internal private telecommunications network. Verizon also met demands for record volumes of calls less than a week after the attacks and helped small businesses survive by transferring their phone numbers to temporary locations to bypass damaged links.

Soon, 18 new SONET (synchronous optical network) fiber-optic rings were built to provide additional telecommunications capacity and increase the system’s reliability; 21 temporary cellular towers were erected by Verizon Wireless to expand capacity in the weeks following the attacks; and 220 free wireless pay phones on trailers were deployed throughout lower Manhattan, providing users with more than 80,000 free calls daily.

And, Verizon set up 4,000 curbside pay phones throughout Manhattan during the first week following the attacks, providing 22,000 minutes worth of calls in just one day after the service began. In the first week after the attack, Verizon’s network transmitted 230 million calls each day, at least twice the normal daily traffic of 115 million calls daily.

But the company did even more to make life easier in the terrible aftermath of the attacks, providing 5,000 free wireless phones — through Verizon Wireless — to help many businesses and New York’s emergency workers.

By the end of the first week after the Sept. 11 attack, Verizon workers had constructed, reconstructed or re-routed 4 million voice and data circuits in Manhattan and parts of New York as part of the restoration process.

Verizon workers drew a lot of praise for their efforts, including the admiration of Joe DeMauro, Verizon’s local Regional Vice President, who said, “It’s been wonderful the way Verizon’s employees have risen to the occasion when faced with a situation no one could ever have imagined. ... At no point during this entire recovery effort did anyone approach me and say something couldn’t be done.”

“We had employees working in total darkness in the 140 West building, wearing respirators, while others who climbed 24 stories to retrieve (computer) servers and carry them downstairs to download their contents to other servers at a safe location,” Odum said. “It was an incredible effort. Even before this happened we were very proud of our employees, but this was a litmus test for us in many ways, and I’m very proud of what we were able to accomplish.”

Odum said Verizon also met similar challenges in Washington, DC, where the company’s telecommunications switching center in the Pentagon was near the point where a third high-jacked airliner crashed into the building. At one point, Verizon telecommunications experts met with firefighters to avert a planned hosing of the area that would have destroyed the switching center that survived the plane impact.

“Losing that switch would have had incredible ramifications for the military and top levels of government,” Odum said.

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