Just days after the September 11 attacks at the World Trade Center, Verizon employees in hazardous material suits work behind Verizon's switching facility at 140 West Street. Here, on the side of the heavily damaged building facing away from Ground Zero, cables are dropped from windows down to street level, where they are channeled through trenches cut into the pavement. Over 30 feet of debris on the other side of the building prevented manhole access to damaged cables underground.

One big lesson - call it a reminder - that came out of the World Trade Center attacks was about the memory, the will, and the enormous problem-solving ability of institutional cultures. Most of the people who answered their various calls of duty on the morning of September 11: the individual police, the firemen, emergency services workers, government employees and elected officials, even military personnel - had never seen anything like what unfolded, that day.

But they did the job, anyway. Calling on cultural and institutional memory, on textbook training, on analogous experience, on largely theoretical disaster playbooks and contingency plans. Adapting at lightspeed. Improvising brilliantly. Staying organized.

That day, and in the days and weeks since, Telecom, too, has done the job. Supporting emergency services. Handling the traffic overloads. Facilitating free communications in and out of the disaster zone. Restoring service to the NYSE and other local businesses. Relocating - in some cases, housing - clients displaced by the disaster.

As you'll see from the two stories in this special section, and from items collected in this issue's Industry News, September 11 taught the telecom industry some hard lessons. But overall, the news is good. The major carriers - Verizon, New York's incumbent, AT&T and others - have proven their practicum is pretty solid. Indeed, Verizon's work since the disaster has done much to demonstrate the value of keeping certain kinds of telecom assets and duties segregated in mature hands. The fully collocated, wide-open central office may not be an idea with long-term legs.

At the same time, or so the Wall Street Journal reported this week (October 11), the concept of co-location premises - telecom hotels - seems to be in renaissance. At first blush, this seems contrary to common sense: in 'wartime,' any collection of materiel is a potential target. True: but this simplistic view ignores the fact that when you collect material and equipment in one place and manage it effectively, you distill a practicum, impose discipline, develop a playbook and scenarios, and plan Bs and Cs and Ds. The result - whether instantiated as a telco CO, a well-run colo site, or a collection of disparate businesses served by a comprehensive disaster-planning concern - is resilience.

More good news: While we're on the subject, disaster planning actually works. Companies whose contingency plans were in place could draw on the services of providers such as Comdisco to terminate carrier service rerouting, provide temporary contact center services, even house displaced employees and provide infrastructure. As you'll see in reading Ellen Muraskin's piece, work with such "preparedness providers" will likely become the norm in coming years, for a wide range of businesses. And the disaster-preparedness field is likely to adapt too, learning to serve smaller customers and businesses with more specialized needs.

More good news: Telecom providers, the channel, consultants, and carriers can coordinate, if required; overcoming business process, bureaucratic, legal and financial impediments to get vital work done quickly. The work by Nortel and other infrastructure providers, by Nextira and similar consulting companies, during the days and weeks after the crisis, is a stellar example.

A final bit of good news: The Internet, for all its unruly character, works as advertised. The sudden, and seemingly grandiose destruction of infrastructure at the WTC caused only microscopic changes in the global Internet map: The Net just did its self-healing thing. ISPs saw very little fluctuation in reachability. In the hours immediately following the attacks, hits on DNS and the web spiked sharply. But aside from some increased latency and a few news-site server collapses, no damage was reported. Originally, we were slated to write an Internet component for this special section, but there was no "disaster story," there. The real Internet story - and we'll focus on it in depth, in upcoming issues - is about security, privacy, new legislation about tapping, and about making the Net more resilient to deliberate attacks, physical and logical.

Special Report

Circuits at Ground Zero

The September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center caused serious collateral damage at a major Verizon switching office. In ways that only a huge incumbent LECT could manage, the company was heroically quick and resourceful in restoring essential services. Here's what Verizon did to dig out.

Terror and Telecom

Enterprises turned to disaster recovery firms like Sungard and Comdisco after losing their offices (or just their voice and data connections), implementing plans they'd previously drawn up to relocate staff and reroute phone traffic. Voice and data equipment vendors and integrators, too, played important roles: building, shipping, installing, and adding to systems in affiliate offices to replace those lost or compromised by the disaster.