NEW YORK (dpa) – Many people reached for their phones after the attack on the World Trade Center towers to see if loved ones were safe. But many calls wouldn’t go through.
The toppled twin towers, which symbolized New York’s financial prowess, also housed equipment and antennas that transmitted millions of calls each day. The damage and an unprecedented volume of traffic overwhelmed an already strained communications system, cutting off much of a metropolis dependent like any modern city on telecommunications.
Callers from as far away as Maine and Atlanta tried for more than an hour before getting through.
“I dial ten times and I’m lucky if two calls go through,” said Chris Harreus, a union shop steward with the Communications Workers of America doing construction in the Newsweek building on 57th Street, more than four miles north of the World Trade Towers. “Service is locking up on cell phones and pay phones.”
Kiran Patel, anxious to hear from a friend who worked in the World Trade Center, waited in front of his midtown office on Sixth Avenue, which gave a clear view onto the smoking towers. Minutes after the second tower collapsed, he used a working cell phone to give out the numbers of his co-workers’ cell phones.
“I just hope one of them can receive a call,” he said.
Knocked out in the twin towers were facilities of carriers including Verizon, although it says there was no major disruption of their network.
Sprint said the loss of leased landline equipment under one of the buildings was blocking 75,000 long distance calls. It was assessing the damage to its wireless infrastructure.
“It’s pandemonium,” said Keisha Smithwick, who works at WestCom, a company that maintains dedicated phone lines for financial trading. She was sent home after the attack that destroyed the towers, where most of her company’s clients were located.
Outside the towers, dazed workers streamed away toward, many with cell phones pressed to their ears, repeatedly trying to make calls.
