(Reuters) – Power outages and flooding caused by Hurricane Sandy disrupted telecommunications services in Northeastern states on Tuesday, resulting in spotty coverage for cellphones, television, home telephones and Internet services.
While all the region’s telecom service providers were having problems, Verizon Communications, which serves many of the states in the hurricane’s path, may have suffered some of the worst damage from the storm to its wireline network.
About 25 percent of the region’s wireless cell towers were out of action after the storm and some 911 emergency call centers were not working, according to Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.
“Our assumption is that communications outages could get worse before they get better,” Genachowski told reporters on a conference call, noting that the storm had not ended.
Also power outages could disrupt more cell sites if they run out of back-up power before commercial electricity services are up and running again.
People lined up at pay-phones in at least one New York neighborhood, the Lower East Side, today as their phones had either lost coverage or they had run out of battery power because there was nowhere to charge their phones in the neighborhood which had lost commercial power.
New York-based Verizon said the storm caused flooding at three Verizon central offices that hold telecom equipment in Lower Manhattan as well as sites in Queens and Long Island.
Its downtown headquarters, which was put out of action 11 years ago by the September 11 attacks, had three feet of water in the lobby at one point. Because of flooding, all its telecom equipment at that office, which serves much of Wall Street and downtown consumers, was knocked out of service.
The company said it was working on pumping out the water in the hope that it could restart its back-up power generators in the facility as commercial power services were not yet restored the morning after the big storm hit.
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