Some History on Telco Fires [was: ATT network recovery preparedness... ]
Frank Coluccio
fcoluccio at dticonsulting.com
Sat Sep 22 05:06:22 UTC 2001
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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