January 23 - February 5, 2013
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Downtown still calling for answers from Verizon By Ka i tly n M e a d e Verizon plans to finish repairing most of the damaged phone lines in Lower Manhattan by the end of January, but the wounds from Superstorm Sandy are far from closed. When Sandy’s storm surge flooded areas of Lower Manhattan, deluging basements with saltwater, much of the communications network was destroyed. In the following days, many relied on mobile charging stations for cell phones to connect to the outside world. Twelve weeks after the storm, some people are still waiting on basic landlines. And with Verizon working to run fiber optic cables across Lower Manhattan, some worry that Verizon is not spending its time or money wisely, which could mean more delays and higher rates. Verizon, the phone and internet service provider to most of Lower Manhattan, recounted their progress before Community Board 1’s Executive Committee, as well as at a City Council hearing that focused on utilities and public services. “We took hundreds of millions of gallons of water into the subbasements of the Broad St. office and the West St. office,” said Chris Levendos, head of national operations and former chief engineer of the New York region at a meeting with Community Board 1 on Jan. 16.
Copper and fiber optic cables radiate from 18 office hubs in Manhattan. The 104 Broad St. office has cables that extend up to Maiden Lane, and the 140 West St. office at Barclay and Vesey Sts. supplies service up to Franklin and N. Moore and cuts over at Worth St. Verizon also reported that 95 percent of the copper cable infrastructure that aggre-
27 hours and Broad St. back online in 10 days. Immediately after that, the mostlyundamaged fiber optic network came back up along with those copper wires that had not been destroyed by seawater. “It became a very quick determination for us that the way to recover faster was to replace all of this with fiber optics as quickly as possible,” Levendos said of the
‘Customers are being told in Independence Plaza, if you want telephone service, point blank, you must have FIOS.’
gated back to Broad St. was destroyed, not only at the hub, but in the manhole and conduit systems and at the points where the network connects inside each building, which is often located in the basement. “The fact that they were damaged at all those locations just compounds the issues,” said Levendos. First they fixed the hubs, getting West St. running in just
damaged copper infrastructure. The advantages of fiber optics were explained as two-fold: First, the cables are more resilient to water damage, though the electronic equipment at either end is not. Second, the higher bandwidth means that the capabilities, especially for large commercial firms, are “almost limitless.” “The challenge is not the fiber optic
cables, we’ve actually run all of those,” he said, it’s the equipment that plugs into them. “We did not have 500 buildings worth of equipment sitting in a warehouse somewhere. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, we got on the phone around the world and told them what we needed. Some of the buildings that are working, their equipment did not exist before the storm.” Verizon says 95 percent of phone and data services would be online in Lower Manhattan by the end of January, the exception being those buildings that Verizon cannot gain access to. At the City Council’s Sandy hearing on Fri., Jan 21, Councilmember Margaret Chin expressed skepticism that Verizon was focusing its energy in the right place since it had filed a complaint when landlords denied them access to their buildings, several of which were severely damaged and were not in use, such as 2 Gold St. and 201 Pearl St. Chin asked Richard Windram, Verizon’s director of government and external affairs, if the priority to get large commercial buildings online was delaying their ability to get service to small business and residential customContinued on page 12