Attacks jam phone system
Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, September 11, 2001
By Mike Benbow
Herald Writer
While local phone systems worked reasonably well after the terrorist attacks in New York and at the Pentagon, people trying to call loved ones on the East Coast often couldn’t get through or faced long waits.
"There certainly are more calls crisscrossing the entire country," said Melissa Barran, spokeswoman in Verizon’s Northwest regional office in Everett.
Barran said local calls increased significantly Tuesday morning, but they did not clog the network or cause delays. The call volume had started to subside by late morning.
But she said that people may have experienced a fast busy signal in trying long distance calls — the sign of a clogged network. "There’s no doubt about it, call volumes are way up," she said.
Cellular phone networks also experienced high call volumes and delays.
In New York, Verizon calls doubled Tuesday — rising from the usual 115 million to 230 million, Barran said. "Back east, our network is heavily loaded, but it’s continuing to function," she said.
While calls were routed around damaged facilities, an unprecedented volume of traffic overwhelmed an already strained communications system, cutting off much of a metropolis dependent like any modern city on telecommunications.
"I dial 10 times and I’m lucky if two calls go through," said Chris Harreus, a union shop steward with the Communications Workers of America doing construction work more than four miles north of the World Trade Center. "Service is locking up on cell phones and pay phones."
People in New York were asked to use the phone only for emergencies, and priority was given to outgoing calls. Call traffic eased later in the day.
New York’s toppled twin towers contained some Verizon facilities, but there was no reported major disruption of the company’s network. All 56 Verizon buildings in New York were evacuated and 13,843 workers were sent home.
Sprint said the loss of leased landline equipment under one of the buildings was blocking 75,000 long-distance calls. It was assessing the damage to its wireless infrastructure.
"It’s pandemonium," said Keisha Smithwick, who works at WestCom, a company that maintains dedicated phone lines for financial trading. She was sent home after the attack that destroyed the towers, where most of her company’s clients were located.
In Everett, it was mostly business as usual, but there were extra security precautions, Barran said.
"We are on a heightened security," she said. "The telecommunications network is more important than ever when a situation like this arises. We’re taking particular precautions in checking the IDs of employees as they come into our buildings."
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
