Telecom Damage Tops $400 Million
BellSouth Says Repairs May Take Months
By Arshad Mohammed
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 6, 2005; D06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/05/AR2005090501231_pf.html
Telephone company BellSouth Corp. yesterday estimated that it would cost
$400 million to $600 million to repair the damage from Hurricane Katrina
and said it could take four to six months to restore service in the
hardest-hit areas of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of Mississippi.
The Atlanta-based company, the dominant phone service provider in much of
the South, stressed that those were preliminary estimates. It has not yet
been able to survey all of its sites given the breadth of the area struck
by the hurricane a week ago.
BellSouth said an estimated 1.1 million of its lines were out in the
region, with 90 percent of these in what it calls the "red zone" -- New
Orleans, areas north of the city and the Gulf Coast of Mississippi.
That is down from 1.75 million lines that were out late last week.
"Our best guidance, at this point, without having had the opportunity to
physically survey and assess the full area, is $400 million to $600
million," BellSouth spokesman Jeff Battcher said of the company's estimated
repair costs.
Technicians yesterday began surveying parts of New Orleans, where the
company believes that the majority of its roughly 472,000 customers remain
without service.
To protect its workers, BellSouth is sending armed guards to protect trucks
of diesel fuel for those of its offices in the city that are running on
generators, Battcher said.
Battcher said BellSouth's main hub in New Orleans, on Poydras Street, is
operating and is a key switching point for long distance carriers such as
MCI Inc., AT&T Corp. and Sprint Nextel Corp.
BellSouth's recovery is also vital to mobile phone providers, which
typically depend heavily on land lines run by local phone companies to
connect their wireless calls.
The major wireless providers said some of their calls are going through in
New Orleans but service is still out in much of the city.
In contrast, most of these companies -- Verizon Wireless, Cingular Wireless
and Sprint Nextel -- said they had made significant progress restoring
service elsewhere in the region, including to Baton Rouge, La., and Mobile,
Ala., as well as along parts of the Mississippi coast.
Public safety experts said Hurricane Katrina exposed two major weaknesses
in emergency communications: a failure to deploy enough satellite phones
and the lack of a national system for police, firefighters and medical
personnel to talk with one another seamlessly.
In addition to disabling much of the regular telephone network in New
Orleans and along the Mississippi coast, the storm damaged local police
radio systems and made it much harder for emergency personnel to help those
in need.
While there is little that can protect telephone lines, wireless towers and
antennas from hurricane winds, experts said more satellite telephones --
which do not depend on ground infrastructure -- should have been in place
before the storm, and mobile communications systems should have been
quickly brought in after.
"My best guess is that one of the things that is going to come out of
Louisiana and the Gulf Coast disaster is a discussion of some kind of
federal drop-in communications capability," said K. Jack Riley, a Rand
Corp. homeland security expert.
"Communications equipment that is self-powered and can be gotten in large
numbers into a disaster scene to help with command and control . . . really
has been one of the missing elements," he said.
Satellite phone makers described huge demand for their products as
government agencies, relief groups and others sought to obtain reliable
communications as well as spare batteries, solar chargers and car chargers.
"We are being flooded with calls from relief organizations, government
agencies, who didn't have phones and who need them," said Liz DeCastro, a
spokeswoman for Iridium Satellite LLC.
================================
George Antunes, Political Science Dept
University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204
Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927
antunes at uh dot edu
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