By Mike Benbow
Herald Writer
Ken Maas of Silver Lake took his first trip to the Grand Canyon this June, leaving in awe of its massive scale.
“You get there, and it’s breathtaking,” he said. “You can’t really believe it. But you know it’s real. I had to pinch myself.”
Maas has been feeling that way constantly this week as he makes his way through numerous security checkpoints to ground zero in New York City – the massive pile of rubble, bodies and debris that was once the New York World Trade Center.
“It’s mind-boggling,” Maas said in a telephone interview from New York City Thursday night. He’d just finished a 12-hour shift at Verizon Communications’ central office in lower Manhattan immediately adjacent to what had been the trade center.
Verizon is the local phone company for New York City.
And Maas, who works in Verizon’s Lynnwood office, is among thousands of people trying to return telephone service to Wall Street and other areas while working in a building that looks much like those in bombed-out areas of Beirut.
One of the trade center’s antennas, Maas said, pierced through several floors of Verizon’s building like an arrow through a bale of straw.
Walls in parts of the building have massive holes. Other areas are condemned. The plumbing doesn’t work. There was only emergency power until Friday.
Maas, who has worked for Verizon for nearly 25 years, was chosen for his ability to restore phone services in emergencies.
He said he’s never seen anything like the devastation at ground zero. The company estimates the attacks destroyed some 200,000 voice lines, 100,000 business lines, 3.6 million data circuits and 10 cellular towers.
“I’ve been on all of what we consider to be major outages in the Northwest, and I couldn’t even imagine the amount of cables that are here,” said Maas, who supervises a cable crew. “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.”
Since the area’s underground conduit collapsed, Maas said, the Verizon facility has cables running out windows and holes and down the side of the building to the ground, where they travel along the sidewalk and into manholes to make the necessary connections.
Maas calls it a major undertaking, one that will take months and years to restore. “Whatever we do is a quick fix,” he said. “The systems will have to be rebuilt to make our product normal again.”
Ivan Seidenberg, president and co-CEO of Verizon, said about 80 percent of the service has been restored, noting the company has “virtually rebuilt the entire communications network in lower Manhattan.”
As some workers focus on the tedious task of fixing broken lines, others clean up seemingly endless dust and debris.
Maas said he has to work with a respirator nearby because of the threat of being enveloped by choking dust, some of which contains cancer-causing asbestos from the twin towers.
The dust creates other problems as well. Maas notes that most of the telephone equipment is computerized, so dealing with the dust and debris is like trying to work on your computer after you’ve dredged it in flour.
Maas has been working in New York all week. He said he arrived with an identification card from GTE, which merged with Bell Atlantic last year to create Verizon. “They said, ‘We know that’s probably good where you come from, but it’s not any good here,’ ” Maas said. “Security is a real big issue down here.”
Maas got a new ID card and now crosses four security checkpoints just to get to work by 6 a.m. He reports to “Verizon City,” a staging area set up in what once was a parking lot. He leaves at 6 or 7 p.m. and takes the subway to the Courtyard Marriott in Times Square.
That’s about all he’s seen during his trip.
“It’s a 24/7 operation,” Maas said. “You don’t quit at 4 and go home. Everybody down here is working long hours.”
Maas doesn’t mind the long shifts.
“When this happened, I was in the bathroom and I heard about it on the radio,” he said. “I went out to the living room and was watching when the second plane hit the tower. I felt disbelief, shock and horror, and I wanted to do something. When they asked who was receptive to going, without a doubt, I volunteered.
“My wife’s totally behind me on this. It could be two weeks, three, a month. I’m fine with it. It’s my pleasure.”
You can call Herald Writer Mike Benbow at 425-339-3459
or send e-mail to benbow@heraldnet.com.
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