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September 14, 2001 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The disaster that ravaged Manhattan’s financial district also crippled the lifeline of cables that ran beneath the city, connecting people inside the area to the outside world.
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In order to ensure that trading resumes by next week, telecommunications
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companies are rerouting data and laying new cable around the battered area
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and powering the transmissions with diesel generators in certain cases.
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“That’s the most telecommunications-intensive square mile in the world,”
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Verizon Communications spokeman Jim Smith told Associated Press. “Our
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customers are desperate, scared and hopeful that we’re moving along. All we
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can do is ask for their patience as we find out what’s going on.”
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No carrier seemed completely sure that the infrastructure would be ready
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when trading kicks off. “We won’t know what the damage is until we try to
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light up our customers,” said Peter Thonis, also a Verizon spokesman. “We’re
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doing that one by one by one.”
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In Verizon’s switching building at 140 West St., which controls 40 percent
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of lower Manhattan’s telephone lines and 20 percent of those used by the New
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York Stock Exchange, girders from a nearby crumbling skyscraper fell through
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its brick walls, smashing computer equipment and leaving a half-inch layer
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of dust and sediment inside, Smith said.
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The carrier was pumping floodwater Thursday from four of the building’s five
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sub-basements, where its huge backbone cables are divided into smaller lines
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that meanderunderneath New York streets. Smith said the soaked cables and
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switches needed to be dried out before they are tested. However, some
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underground lines outdoors can’t be tested or fixed, said Smith, because “we
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have manholes covered with tons of rubble.”
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Verizon was considering laying temporary cables on top of the street, inside
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protective pipe or conduit, Smith said. Verizon, which is missing 10 workers
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in the disaster, has 14,000 employees currently working in New York, Thonis
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said.
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Some of WorldCom’s switching stations in the area received only intermittent
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electric service Thursday and relied diesel generators to stay online, said
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WorldCom spokeswoman Linda Laughlin. Since it acquired Internet service
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provider UUNet Technologies, WorldCom has become one of the largest digital
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data carriers serving the district.
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Besides the telecoms, local contractors like Hugh O’Kane Datacom were
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threading new cable under the street, bypassing the damaged local loops of
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fiber running under or near the destroyed World Trade Center. “Some of these
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loops have been knocked out,” said company president Hugh O’Kane. “You have
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to cut off the part of the network that goes through the damaged area and
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reconnect it to a usable network.”
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Laughlin said WorldCom was working around the damage by programming its
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switches and routers to send data through alternate circuits bordering
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broken lines. “We’re taking a circuit from one route that may not be in
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operation, to an alternate route that is,” Laughlin said. “We already had
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additional capacity built in.” The NYSE and other markets planned a full
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test of communications and other market infrastructure systems on Saturday.
