Phone Networks Fail Once Again In a Disaster
By DIONNE SEARCEY and JESSE DRUCKER
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 6, 2005; Page A19
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112597603254832427,00.html?mod=technology%5Fmain%5Fwhats%5Fnews
NEW ORLEANS -- Nearly 1.8 million phone lines and countless cellphones were
interrupted or went dead along the Gulf Coast. Thousands of New Orleans
residents trapped in their homes by rising water couldn't call out to seek
help. And friends and relatives couldn't contact them to find out whether
they had escaped.
For the third time in four years, vital telephone systems failed after a
major disaster hit the U.S. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks,
the blackout of 2003 and now Hurricane Katrina, residents and even
emergency personnel found themselves cut off. Even as of yesterday, large
parts of the telecom system in the area hit by Katrina still had spotty or
no service, with BellSouth saying about one million of its lines were down
or working only sporadically.
What went wrong this time?
The systems responsible for transmitting Internet data, landline and
cellphone traffic broke down after backup generators, designed to keep
phone lines powered, either ran out of fuel or were flooded because they
were located on lower floors of phone-equipment centers rather than out of
reach from flood water. Phone lines broke as poles went down from high
winds or the flooding. And an onslaught of calls overwhelmed the few lines
that still were operating.
To BellSouth Corp., the region's dominant phone company and part-owner of
cellular giant Cingular Wireless, Katrina posed a set of unique challenges:
Many BellSouth employees trained to repair and maintain its networks became
victims themselves. Some of the company's equipment in New Orleans is old
and vulnerable to water damage; splices in its copper phone lines, for
example, are covered with paper instead of protective plastic. And at its
key New Orleans operations center, the building was threatened by reports
of looters and employees had to be evacuated. BellSouth expects the
hurricane damage will cost it $400 million to $600 million.
The situation could deteriorate if critical equipment -- including
machinery at one telecom hub in New Orleans that is the nerve center for
large parts of the region -- can't be fed constantly with fuel as well as
water used for cooling. Cingular, meanwhile, said yesterday that its repair
crews had entered New Orleans and some cellular calls were going through,
though at "reduced levels," and competitor Sprint Nextel Corp. said it had
gotten 35 of its 208 cellular sites in the greater New Orleans area
running, allowing outgoing calls for the first time since the storm hit a
week ago.
How can phone systems be made to withstand future disasters? Engineers and
telecom executives say that part of the answer could be for the networks to
create additional capacity and to install more emergency power systems at
secure locations. They add that additional wireless infrastructure --
possibly incorporating satellite or microwave technology -- could provide
backup systems in emergencies.
"There are new services that would incorporate a mixture of systems so that
in events like this there is a higher degree of survivability," said John
Muleta, an attorney at Venable LLP and the recently departed head of the
wireless bureau of the Federal Communications Commission.
But the FCC doesn't require phone companies to have a certain amount of
emergency power. Plus, the flooding last week of numerous telephone central
offices that house switches -- the specialized computers that route calls
-- raises questions about whether those centers are being built or sited to
withstand the most serious disasters.
Yet operators of the phone systems were hardly caught by surprise.
BellSouth, whose engineers have vast experience dealing with hurricanes,
prepared meticulously for the storm and began tracking it two weeks ago
from yesterday as waves were building. On the day before Katrina hit the
mainland, the Atlanta-based company sent a corporate jet with a stash of
satellite phones, food and water for personnel at a key operations center
in downtown New Orleans and elsewhere on Gulf Coast. The company sandbagged
back-up power generators at switching centers throughout the region and
propped floodgates against doors. It gathered technicians from all over the
region to be on standby for repairs.
The next night, things went wrong: The power at the key New Orleans hub
went out and the building switched to generators. The rain was so fierce
that water blew into the window vents where the machines usually release
heat. Water got inside the generators and splattered onto the floor.
At a command center in Atlanta, a white map showed an ever-increasing
number of red smudges indicating power outages in hundreds of locations --
a telltale sign that phone service was also out, or going to be out soon,
in those places.
Phone-switching centers are equipped with large batteries that kick in if
the generators fail, but the batteries last only about eight hours. So
BellSouth began assembling 1,200 power generators from all over its
nine-state region and hauling them on trucks toward areas outside the
hurricane's path. The trucks started moving into some areas that weren't
flooded as the storm subsided. By Tuesday, the day after the storm hit, the
company was starting to assemble tents where displaced employees and their
families could shower and sleep.
At the New Orleans hub, repair efforts grew complicated because so many
employees had brought their families there to ride out the storm because
the building was thought to be hurricane-proof. By Wednesday, the center's
plumbing and sanitation had gone out. Outside the brick building, people
started collecting on the flooded streets. Police warned the company about
the breakdown of security. The building could be a target for looters, they
cautioned, because it was one of the few places in town with electricity.
That night, with state troopers on guard, 82 employees and their families
still at the building piled into buses and headed out of the city as they
were threatened by looters. They made sure the air conditioners were
running and the generators had enough fuel as they left the building empty
for the night. But by 6 a.m. the next day the air conditioners had run out
of water needed to chill them. Workers returned just as things were
starting to heat up. On Thursday morning, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation sent six heavily armed officers to the building to make sure
no looters could get in. They were followed by a skeleton crew of engineers
to oversee the equipment.
Meanwhile, technicians and other workers gathered at a corporate landing
strip outside the city to receive tetanus and hepatitis shots before they
boarded a company jet to deliver bullhorns, diapers, toilet paper, juice
and water to tent cities where stranded employees could recover.
The downed landline connections also crippled the area's cellphone
networks. That's because much of a wireless call is actually carried over
traditional phone lines. And even in areas where the landline connections
to the cellphone networks stayed up, power at the cellphone transmission
towers often ran out, knocking the towers offline.
Such a situation could be mitigated, some telecom engineers and telecom
executives say, by linking certain cellphone towers to satellite or
microwave communications systems that could be deployed in an emergency.
Such technology already is used in some sparsely populated rural areas,
where cell towers connect to faraway switching stations via microwaves, not
underground cables. And several carriers are examining using the hotly
anticipated technology known as WiMAX to provide a similar service:
wireless connections to the wired network.
Paul Kolodzy, an engineering consultant and former chairman of the FCC's
spectrum policy task force, says there's another step cellular companies
could take: encouraging their customers to use text messaging or email sent
from their phones during a crisis. That's because a 12-line wireless email
or text message takes up about as much network capacity as a single second
of talking on a cellphone. In fact, text messaging was one of the few ways
in which many Katrina refugees could make any contact with others last week.
================================
George Antunes, Political Science Dept
University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204
Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927
antunes at uh dot edu
--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.344 / Virus Database: 267.10.18/90 - Release Date: 9/5/2005
Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post.
_______________________________________________
MEDIANEWS mailing list
[email protected]
To unsubscribe send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
