Published December 2001

Verizon employees rose
to Sept. 11 challenge

“Verizon’s depth of management talent and technical skill enabled us to respond with incredible speed to restore service and respond to this national crisis,” said the company’s Chairman and Co-CEO, Charles Lee.

That’s the kind of praise that all CEOs like to spread around, bragging about their employees and the skills that give a company an edge over its competition.

Sometimes they’re right; sometimes it’s hype.

In Verizon’s case — a company with more than 259,000 employees in 44 countries and $65 billion a year in revenues — many of those managers and front-line people have just proven their worth and verified the truth in Lee’s praise.

As our cover story in this issue notes, Verizon has the key role in efforts to reconstruct New York City’s telecommunications network in Manhattan after it was destroyed by attacks on the World Trade Center by sky-jacked airliners.

The terrorist attacks wiped out communication channels used by scores of global businesses in the World Trade Center, the New York Stock Exchange, hundreds of Manhattan businesses and dozens of wholesale customers who lease lines from Verizon and resell telecommunications service to thousands of their own clients.

By Nov. 1, in less than two months, Verizon’s management and repair crews reinstalled more than 99 percent of those networks, under conditions similar to working in bombed-out war zones. The destruction of the original buildings and systems was so complete that a whole new world of wires, switches, computers and facilities had to be created and connected to a perimeter of surviving networks.

The challenging tasks required much more than simply wiring skills, figuring out the right color codes and knowing the inner workings of telecommunication software. Verizon’s employees needed to bring plenty of innovation and a talent for thinking outside-the-switching-center to solve all of the problems encountered.

Since millions of people globally depended on the telecommunications hub once housed in the World Trade Center and surrounding facilities, Verizon’s employees deserve a lot of credit for their speed in getting communications back on line under frighteningly difficult and hazardous conditions.

It’s inspiring and encouraging when people who are called professionals — such as Verizon’s multilevel teams — prove beyond any doubt that they are professionals.

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