They were the first hit, they were the largest loss in human terms, and they were symbolically most significant, but the Twin Towers weren't the only buildings in New York to collapse during the September 11 attack at the World Trade Center. When the fourth building in the complex fell - Building Seven - it slewed against a critical Manhattan telephone central office at 140 West Street. Holes were gashed in the exterior of the CO. Water from burst mains poured into the egress tunnel and cable vault below street level, where some 200,000 local circuits and 3.5 million trunking circuits were served. Steel girders from Seven World Trade Center hit the pavement with such force that they penetrated several feet into the ground, piercing the cables that formed the beginning of one of the most prestigious last miles in the world.

The Pyramid

The New York Telephone Company Building (technically, the Barclay-Vesey building, named after the streets to its north and south) was built back in 1927, when such a thing as the New York Telephone Company actually existed.

It was designed to be imposing. Verizon Chairman Ivan Seidenberg noted during a press conference: "We joke that the Barclay-Vesey Building is built like one of the pyramids." Because the structure was purpose-engineered as a telephone facility and natural light was not a requirement for switching equipment, the 32-story building was designed in an unusually massive format, with a short tower atop its center; and featuring setbacks that do, in some small way, invoke the ancient pyramids of Central America.

It's a historically significant structure. The building is considered to be the first Art Deco skyscraper and elaborate Art Deco detailing is found throughout the building; this ornamentation dominated by bell motifs (think of the Bell Telephone logo). Bronze plates on the lobby floor re-enact the construction of New York's telephone network.

Not only was the building a trendsetter in exterior style, it's also a prototypical CO facility. The basement serves as the cable vault, where both local loops and trunks from other COs and CLECs arrive from sub-street conduits. Before the attacks, these cables were neatly laid across steel racks and hangers, throughout the basement. Within the vault, the cables are three to four inches thick, with multiple thousands of twisted pairs bundled into groups of 50 or 100, wrapped in a metallic mesh that provides grounding, then wrapped within stiff PVC sheaths. Also in the basement: redundant emergency power generators.

The cables are split out and routed up through the floor to cross-connect frames, where the 200,000 local loops are punched down. From there, it's up through the building to the switches - there are four in the facility, more than $10 million worth of equipment in those switches alone.

Early Recovery

If you stood on the fourth floor of the New York Telephone Company Building after the attacks on the 11th, you would have been able to look out substantial holes in the building's brick exterior, directly across to the huge pile of debris from the collapsed Seven World Trade Center building. Immediately behind you, you'd see racks and racks of DACS equipment, a whole floor of such equipment, now covered in dust, except at the bottom of the racks, where the water had flooded across the floors.

Upstairs, on the seventh floor, a similar hole (here adjacent to the multiple equipment rows of a Lucent 5ESS switch) was in use by fire fighters, who had dragged fire hoses up through the building to pour water down on the smoldering pile of rubble below. With windows blown out throughout the building, this meant that water sprayed back in when the wind swirled.

The Immediate Aftermath

Lawrence Babbio, vice chairman and president, Verizon Communications (New York, NY - 212-395-2121, www.verizon.com), was ultimately in charge of the restoration effort. But in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, it was Verizon's emergency procedures playbook - and well-trained local and middle management and trades - who responded first. Verizon's operations swung into overdrive as soon as the Twin Towers came down. Before it was even declared safe to enter the building at 140 West, workers at nearby COs had created approximately 9,500 temporary local circuits to service rescue and firefighting operations. This first step, Babbio says, was completed within 48 hours.

To let Manhattanites get reassuring words home, Verizon converted some 400 payphones in the area to provide free outbound service within the five boroughs. Like AT&T, Verizon has a significant amount of mobile disaster relief equipment. This included, a Verizon spokesperson said, flatbed trucks loaded with portable cellular payphones. Two hundred and twenty such cellular phones allowed three-minute calls anywhere in the continental U.S. During a single day of the second week following the disaster, residents made 58,000 calls from these cell phones and another 22,000 local calls from regular payphones.

Once the all-clear had been sounded, getting into 140 West was the next order of business. The truly daunting task, and one that had to be picked up as soon as possible, was restoring trunk switching through the site and local service to the major area businesses - the major trading partners in America's equity markets.

Restocking NYSE Circuits

For starters, there was the New York Stock Exchange, which alone used 15,000 voice and data circuits. Not all of these were cut when 140 West Street was damaged: Over the past several years, the Exchange and Verizon had already conspired to move 80% of their circuits to different switching offices, making the market less vulnerable to local equipment failure. Still, 20% of the circuits were handled by 140 West Street, according to Babbio; and several thousand additional circuits were compromised by sub-street damage caused by the collapse, water seepage, and other aftereffects. By Monday, September 17, however, over 14,000 of the 15,000 circuits were operational - a really stunning demonstration of effective emergency planning, flexible logistical thinking, hard work and inspiration.

The 9:30 ringing of the bell opening trading on the NYSE, Seidenberg said, was "an important signal to the world that America was open for business." And the bell rang on time. "Not only was the network rebuilt, but it was built in a fashion to handle record numbers of transactions." Some 2.3 billion shares changed hands on the trading floor that day, the most ever.

Getting circuits restored to the NYSE was an important symbolic win, but only a start. Babbio says: "If you look at 140 West Street, it takes care of two different things. It takes care of 200,000 customers that are contained within that office geography. We also have a lot of circuits that go through that office destined for other locations. There are about 3.5 million circuits that go through that building." Not all these circuits could be rerouted, given that the switches they routed to were destroyed, but by the 17th, Babbio said, some 90% of the circuits that could be rerouted, had been. Further, "even though traffic today is heavy," Babbio noted, "the blocking is within normal limits of what we would expect under the volumes we have."