Verizon wasn’t planning to restore phone service to storm-damaged office towers in Lower Manhattan until May — before Mayor Bloomberg intervened and called that timetable “unacceptable.”
Speaking today at a forum on the city’s future after Sandy, the mayor disclosed that he had a “long conversation” last night with Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam and together they developed a plan to provide temporary telecommunications services to downtown buildings by the end of the year.
“Their schedule right now says Lower Manhattan is not going to be up until May,” Bloomberg told a packed crowd of business and government leaders at the downtown Marriott.
“I pointed out that is just not acceptable…Those buildings downtown that lost electricity and heat should be back up by the end of the month. But they can’t be occupied unless we have telephone service. And that’s going to be our No. 1 priority for downtown.”
Verizon lost 95 percent of its copper wiring to the salt waters that enveloped its downtown system during the storm.
That would explain why, five weeks after Sandy, stores downtown still display signs reading “Cash Only — No Credit Cards.” The cards are processed through phone connections.
Deputy Mayor Cas Holloway said Verizon has undertaken a monumental recovery effort and is replacing its unusable copper wires with advanced fiber optics.
“They have to basically do 20 years of fiber optic installations within the next four months,” he said. “So 20 years within four months.”
While that’s underway, Holloway said the company, with the city’s help, will also work to provide interim service to the affected buildings.
Otherwise, he said, companies “will simply decide they have to go someplace else. Many will come back. (But) we all know when people leave they might decide that they like where they go better.”
A surprise guest at the forum, sponsored by the Regional Plan Association and the New York League of Conservation Voters, was former Vice President Al Gore.
He praised Bloomberg for being ahead of the curve when it came to global warming initiatives and bluntly declared that Sandy was one of the results of added carbons.
“We’re putting 90 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every single day, spewing it up there as if the atmosphere of the planet is an open sewer…” said Gore.
“Dirty energy causes dirty weather.”