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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Some History on Telco Fires [was: ATT network recovery preparedness... ]
SD: Like yourself, I seem to recall a fire in the early 1970s, but that was rather tame and preceded the 'really big one' by several years, which occurred in February of 1975. That's the one I think you're referring to, I believe. Mayor Beame was in office at the time. A bit of history follows. Sorry if it's OT, but I think that there's a story in here somewhere that is instructive. The story was reported quite accurately in the following, from my recollection. I was the AT&T liason to NY Telephone (now Verizon) at the time, in charge of restoration of all AT&T/WU/OCC services that were transiting the "Second Avenue Central Office" at the time of the fire. The C.O. was located at East 13th Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan, despite an error in the account below, which has the terms "street" and "avenue" reversed in one place. This fire, incidentally, remains the worst ever to befall a communications center, even beyond that which befell the Illinois Bell Hinsdale Central Office in 1987. It's been lost to history, however. I should note here that about a dozen or so fire fighters eventually died from this incident, after the fact, as a result of inhaling massive amounts of toxic fumes which led to varying types of respiratory ailments and cancers. >From one of the few places on the 'Net where this story is documented: http://www.privateline.com/issues/p.l.No11A.html ---begin snip: VII. History -- - The Bell System's worst single service disaster This excerpt is from John Brooks _Telephone_, long out of print. It details how in 1975 a 4,000 man Bell System task force restored service to 170,000 phones knocked out by fire at the 13th Ave. <sic> and Second Street <sic> switching office in New York City. . . "The most local and transient, but not the least dramatic, of these was a fire of unknown origin that swept through a switching center at Second Avenue and Thirteenth Street in lower Manhattan on February 27, 1975, causing the worst single service disaster ever suffered by any single Bell operating company. Starting around midnight in the cable vault under the eleven-story building's basement, the fire spread rapidly upward. Alert work by New York City firemen confined it to the lower floors and saved the building itself from destruction, but dense smoke from burning cable insulation suffused the unburdened parts of the building and virtually all the equipment in it was put out of service. By afternoon, when the fire was finally declared under control -- with no loss of life to either firemen or telephone people-- twelve Manhattan telephone exchanges, embracing three hundred city blocks and 104,00 subscriber lines serving 170,000 telephones, were out of service, and among the institutions bereft of working telephones were six hospitals and medical centers, eleven firehouses, three post offices, one police precinct, nine public schools, and three higher education institutions, including New York University. Before fireman had given telephone repairmen the O.K. to enter the building, the Bell System had begun one of the typical crisis mobilizations of which it is justly proud -- indeed, the largest such mobilization ever. New York Telephone, AT&T Long Lines, Western Electric, and Bell Labs contingents converged on the area, and a crisis headquarters -- inevitably called a war room -- was established in a rented storefront on Fourteenth Street, under the immediate direction of Lee Oberst, New York City area vice- president of New York Telephone. (Oberst, the type-cast hero for such and operation, was a South Bronx- born man of 54 who had started his Bell System career in 1946 as a twenty-eight dollar a week switchman.) Within twenty-four hours, emergency telephone service had been restored to the medical, police and fire facilities affected, and in hardly more time the task force assessing damage and beginning to restore service had reached its peak strength of four thousand, working around the the clock in twelve hour shifts of two thousand each. Western Electric officials were ordered to commandeer or quickly manufacture huge quantities or replacement equipment; shipments by air began the day after the fire, and eventually the amount of equipment shipped in amounted to three thousand tons. The work to be done in the damaged building varied all the way from installing new ESS equipment and writing computer programs for it to cleaning smoke-damaged relays with toothbrushes and Q- tips. A couple of happy circumstances speeded the work along. One of these was the fact that the the third floor of the burned building happened to be standing vacant at the time, thus providing space for the rapid installation of an entirely new main frame for handling trunk calls, which was shipped by cargo jet on February 28 from Western Electric's Hawthorne works. Another was the convenient availability for emergency use of excess switching capacity, from the ESS installations at Seventh Avenue and Eighteenth Street and at New York Telephone headquarters at Sixth and Forty-second. Such capacity could temporarily accommodate 28,000 of the 104,000 served lines. "The miracle on Fourteenth Street," Oberst kept calling it -- a bit melodramatically, and it appeared for a time, overoptimistically. On March 11, New York Telephone announced plans to restore service to all ordinary telephone subscribers on March 16. As that date approached, it developed that water used in the fire-fighting operation had damaged many of the cables entering the building and that the miracle would be postponed. Except for a few stray problem lines, service was restored just before midnight on March 21 -- twenty two days after the disaster, instead of the year or more that would have been required under normal conditions. The restoration was ceremoniously marked by a call from William Ellinghaus, New York Telephone's president, to Mayor Beame of New York at the mayoral residence, Gracie Mansion. The cost of the job, still not precisely calculated six months later, had been about ninety million dollars, of which almost all was covered by insurance, so the disaster cost no increase in rates to subscribers or lost profits to stockholders. It remains a fair question whether New York Telephone had been prudent, in the most telephone-dependent area in the country, to house twelve exchanges and five toll switching machines in a single building. (2) (2) _New York Times_, February 28, March 13, March 24, March 30, 1975; AT&T Share Owners Newsletter, First Quarter 1975. ----end snip -FAC > > On Fri, 21 Sep 2001, David Lesher wrote: > > http://www.att.com/ndr/ndr_e_d.html > > > > Quote: > > (AT&T has never lost an entire central office), > > > > Oh? > > > > I'm thinking of that panel office fire in NYC, circa 1970. > > I've spoke with one of the people involved in the recovery > of that office. The AT&T switch continued to operate through > the fire and several weeks afterwards. They have a tape of > a newscast where Mayor Koch is praising the efforts of New > York Telephone and the people of New York. > > A better example is Hinsdale Illinois. As far as I know, I > haven't met anyone personally involved with that one. It > disrupted a lot of service, I don't think the fire destroyed > the entire building. > > The most recent example is Rochelle Park, NJ; but I believe > that building was officially owned by Bell Atlantic. There the > damage was limited to power equipment. > > With divesture, the pre-divesture disasters as well as the Bell > logo went on to the books of the LECs. AT&T's NDR has only been > around since 1991. So the statement is technically correct, although > it omits some details. > > > > > On Fri, 21 Sep 2001, David Lesher wrote: > > http://www.att.com/ndr/ndr_e_d.html > > > > Quote: > > (AT&T has never lost an entire central office), > > > > Oh? > > > > I'm thinking of that panel office fire in NYC, circa 1970. > > I've spoke with one of the people involved in the recovery > of that office. The AT&T switch continued to operate through > the fire and several weeks afterwards. They have a tape of > a newscast where Mayor Koch is praising the efforts of New > York Telephone and the people of New York. > > A better example is Hinsdale Illinois. As far as I know, I > haven't met anyone personally involved with that one. It > disrupted a lot of service, I don't think the fire destroyed > the entire building. > > The most recent example is Rochelle Park, NJ; but I believe > that building was officially owned by Bell Atlantic. There the > damage was limited to power equipment. > > With divesture, the pre-divesture disasters as well as the Bell > logo went on to the books of the LECs. AT&T's NDR has only been > around since 1991. So the statement is technically correct, although > it omits some details. > > >
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