Metro

Verizon remains on hold

Thousands of Verizon customers are still battling spotty land-line service after Hurricane Sandy wiped out miles of phone cable in lower Manhattan, officials said yesterday.

Storm waters completely flooded Verizon’s 150-foot-long switching facility, or vault, below the company’s Broad Street building, wrecking miles of copper cable.

And during the cleanup in a vault below Verizon’s West Street headquarters, workers discovered live sea creatures.

“We even found a live shrimp and a live crab in the vault,” Christopher Levendos, 45, Verizon’s director of national operations, said during a tour of the underground facilities. “We put them into a bucket.”

As a result, thousands of customers with land lines below Worth Street have patchy service.

The company is unsure when everything will be back to normal, but there is a silver lining: Those damaged copper cables will be replaced with fiber-optic cable, which is water resistant.

“I haven’t seen anything like this since 9/11,” Levendos said. “It is a catastrophic impact.”