Wanted in Manhattan:
A Working Telephone
By SHAWN YOUNG
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
interactive.wsj.com
NEW YORK -- Investment bankers from Lehman Brothers who fled their damaged lower Manhattan offices in the wake of the World Trade Center disaster two weeks ago had to go only about three miles to find temporary digs at a Sheraton hotel in midtown. But they had to go all the way to Texas to replace some of their phones.
Across from the disaster site at the Porta Bella discount men's clothing store, the phones have been out, and manager Ashraf Kenawy has been calling in credit-card numbers over his personal cellphone.
"I'm losing a lot," said Mr. Kenawy, who has watched customers become suspicious or lose patience with his improvised way of handling credit cards.
Other merchants downtown are turning away business because they can't take credit cards, or they are putting carbon paper over customers' cards and rolling pens across the surface to take imprints. Many are longing for the imprint machines that were standard before credit approvals routinely came through the phone lines.
A working phone is suddenly one of the hottest commodities in downtown New York. As companies scramble to relocate damaged or destroyed offices, some are finding that their biggest problem isn't finding space: It is getting phones and computers connected.
Beyond the blast area, many companies that have moved offices are all clamoring for phone lines at once, meaning even more delays in getting back to work. Sudden surges in phone traffic have made it tough for those even miles from the blast site to get calls through.
Verizon Communications Inc., the regional Bell titan based in New York, is racing to restore service to about 100,000 phone lines that were knocked out of service when the collapse of the Trade Center towers severely damaged a key equipment hub. Miles of sensitive glass cable that usually carry millions of calls a day are buried under several stories of rubble.
"We're working 24 hours a day to get the service restored," said Verizon spokesman Peter Thonis. The company has put 200,000 lines back into service since the disaster. It also has vastly increased cellphone capacity in the damaged area and has been handing out cellphones to lower Manhattan customers whose lines are out.
Cellphones, which are recovering more quickly from services problems related to the disaster, have become the survivor's tool. At the U.S. District Court in lower Manhattan, where four followers of Osama bin Laden were recently convicted in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa, judges working on cellphones are scrambling to keep up with a tremendous backlog of postponed trials and hearings during the period since the attacks.
Verizon provided each judge with a cellphone, but service has been spotty, says senior U.S. District Judge Milton Pollack. "That cellphone rings and gets passed around in my chambers to the person who needs it," the judge said. "There were a lot of disconnections."
By late Monday, regular phone service had been restored to judges' chambers and a few other key courthouse offices. But court officials were expecting it to be weeks before the rest of the building was hooked up again. "Verizon has not even given us a date," one court official said.
Verizon is trying, visiting 900 businesses a day to help determine how their service is working and what they need, said Bruce Gordon, president of retail markets.
But that has been cold comfort to companies such as G.Z. Stephens, an executive-search firm formerly located in the Trade Center.
"We went through a week in which we could get no information whatsoever from Verizon," said Executive Vice President Joan Zimmerman. "I recognize the duress the system was under, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating to do business."
The midtown offices of executive-search firm Spencer Stuart Inc., based in Chicago, haven't had voice lines since the attack. The company received phone service through a reseller that was affected by the equipment damage from the Trade Center bombing, said Chief Technology Officer Rick Abel. Spencer Stuart's New York office gets data and 800-number service from AT&T Corp., and those services were restored shortly after the attack.
Employees are using personal cellphones, and Mr. Abel has rigged the 800-number service to connect to a switchboard in Stamford, Conn., that transfers calls to the appropriate numbers.
"That was easy," Mr. Abel says. The hard part is informing customers about the new ways to get through. "Most of our business cards have direct lines on them. It has really been one temporary measure after another," he adds.
AT&T, based in New York, says some of its local-phone customers throughout the city had service problems because a network ring was damaged in the attack.
Even finding space that already has working phone lines is no guarantee. At the Sheraton Manhattan, where Lehman Brothers has filled all 650 rooms with bankers and their staffs, the phone system had hardly any data capacity and was set up to handle only about 75 outgoing calls at once, a person close to the firm said. Not surprisingly, the system became overloaded last week.
Lehman decided to take the matter into its own hands and snagged 1,000 idle phone numbers from SBC Communications Inc., the San Antonio, Texas, regional Bell. SBC isn't actively selling phone service in New York, but it has the numbers as part of a largely inactive drive to sell service outside its home territory.
Lehman has assigned the numbers, which are set up with voice mail and call-forwarding features, to staffers whose phones at the World Financial Center across the street from the Trade Center have been wiped out. Callers who reach those numbers either will leave messages or get forwarded to the banker's cellphone or an alternate line. Lehman continues to work closely with Verizon, which is connecting the new phone and data lines at the Sheraton. Although Verizon is stretched thin, it has now helped equip the Sheraton to handle about 300 simultaneous calls, and Lehman expects to be up to more than 500 by the weekend. |
