Millions of calls have not gone through, millions of dollars have been lost, and millions of Illinoisans have coped with an interruption in something they take for granted: worry-free telephone service.
The toll from the fire that destroyed most of a vital Illinois Bell switching station in Hinsdale last Sunday still cannot be totaled. And the problem isn`t going away.
About half of the 35,000 western suburban Illinois Bell customers who have been without phone service for a week were back on line Saturday-sort of and some of the time.
But it was hardly the worry-free service that was taken for granted before a fire devastated a major switching station in Hinsdale last Sunday. Since then, millions of calls either could not be placed at all or were delayed, millions of dollars have been lost and millions of Illinoisans have had to cope with service interruptions.
The phone company reconnected customers in southeastern Du Page County through the old, damaged switching equipment, said spokeswoman Pat Montgomery. The remaining customers should be back on line by the end of Friday.
Reconnected customers were scattered throughout the six suburbs that have been phoneless for a week, but the service was not of the usual Bell quality, she added. Customers can call only within their towns; regional and long-distance calling is not possible. And that`s not the only limitation.
”There could be a lot of static on the line because of corrosion in the equipment,” Montgomery said. ”And there could be a delay before a customer gets a dial tone.”
Also, the reconnected phones were not working all the time, said Hinsdale Village Manager Ron Ruskey. ”It`s still difficult to get a call out,” he said. ”The service comes and goes.”
Ruskey said he and Illinois Bell officials have held several meetings at which they discussed a ”number of things” concerning restoration of full service to the affluent suburb. But he denied reports that the village was demanding compensation from Bell for the extra expenses of providing emergency services.
And Bell officials still say it will be mid-June before new switching equipment for all 35,000 phoneless customers will be on line.
Residents and businesses at first were told they were in for a weeklong inconvenience, something that might have bordered on an adventure. Now many are staring at the prospect of another month of crippling business losses, aggravating relationships among families and friends, and, potentially, life- threatening emergencies becoming life-taking tragedies.
The fire not only blacked out the 35,000 customers in southeastern Du Page County but also cut off the other 680,000 residents of the state`s wealthiest county from points east, because the Hinsdale facility was a
”hub” through which flowed calls between farflung corners of the metropolitan area.
As many as 24 million calls stayed unmade or were delayed or tortuously rerouted around the blackened mass of high-tech equipment that once handled 3.5 million calls a day.
Millions of residents in northeastern Illinois, from Kankakee to the Wisconsin border, had trouble making long-distance calls for the first few days of the outage. And callers around the nation who tried to reach 312 area- code numbers often could not get through.
Besides residential phones, it is estimated that 9,000 businesses with 100,000 employees were affected-1,000 of them, with 15,000 employees, in the phoneless suburbs. Estimates of lost business already run into the tens of millions of dollars.
Illinois Bell stands to lose millions of dollars in repair costs, rebates of phone charges and, perhaps, lawsuits, which some companies are expected to file. A knowledgeable telecommunications executive said the company`s cost could go over $30 million. Lost revenues could amount to $2 million a day for the local service alone, which does not include other revenues from connecting cellular and long-distance calls.
The phone company also has to answer some questions: Why was such a vital station, one of three hubs in the metropolitan area, unmanned? Why wasn`t it equipped with sophisticated fire-extinguishing equipment that might have doused the fire? Why did more than an hour elapse between the first alarm and the arrival of firefighters?
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If the disaster proves once again the frailty of the advanced technology, it also demonstrates the resilience of people.
”I wrote a letter to my daughter in Wyoming for the first time in years to tell her why she hadn`t heard from me,” said Marilyn Shoemaker, who is phoneless at home in Darien and at work in Hinsdale. ”I guess we`ll all learn to write letters again.”
The crisis began last Sunday afternoon, when a sensor in the Hinsdale hub, 120 S. Lincoln St., triggered an alarm at an Illinois Bell office in Springfield. About 68 minutes later, the Hinsdale Fire Department was notified, but the phones had fallen silent long before then.
Then came the arduous work of restoring service. Illinois Bell`s initially optimistic estimate that all service would be restored by the end of the week had to be dropped by Thursday. Bell officials thought at first that they could salvage some of the equipment that handled local calls, but the delicate computer links and wiring continued to corrode despite efforts to dehumidify the station. It all would have to be replaced, officials realized. The first customers to see a return to normal were those outside the blackout area whose regional calls were being choked off at the Hinsdale bottleneck. As much as half of that ”flow-through” service was restored by the end of the week, and by Monday all of it should be back on line, according to James Eibel, Illinois Bell`s vice president of operations. Included in this category of service are suburb-to-suburb and city-to-suburb calls, long-distance calls and 800-number calls.
Next, the 13,000 private business lines that run through the Hinsdale office will be reconnected. These lines carry computer data, such as the information that makes sure you have enough money in your checking account when you try to make a withdrawal at an automatic teller machine. About a third of the area`s 900 Cash Station machines were disabled by the Hinsdale fire, but they and all private business lines should be restored by the end of the week, Eibel said.
Finally, and farthest in the future, is restoration of full service to the residents of Hinsdale, Willowbrook, Burr Ridge, Clarendon Hills and parts of Oak Brook and Darien who have had no service since the fire. Permanent service for 21,000 customers will not be restored until June 1.
If all goes according to plan-and it hasn`t yet-Illinois Bell will bring back the remaining lines at a rate of 7,000 a week, Eibel said. That`s why it will be the third week in June before life returns to normal in those areas.
Fortunately, by the end of the week, no deaths had been blamed on the phone outage. In the towns totally without phone service, the police and fire departments set up emergency reporting stations and police officers were making more frequent rounds. The system seems to have worked, just as the cellular mobile phones that Hinsdale Hospital has been using seem to have established a fairly reliable internal communications network to get doctors where they are needed.
Cellular phones have provided a kind of backup network during the crisis, mainly for business executives. Some businesses have even rented cars with cellular phones to carry on their work. Vendors of cellular equipment reported booming sales and rentals.
Jim Stolfe`s cellular-equipped Audi was allowing him to keep in touch with his suppliers, but his customers, who do not have the number, have melted away. Stolfe, whose Connie`s Pizza in Westmont is primarily a telephone-based delivery business, said his business is down by about two-thirds.
With the approach of the dinner hour last Thursday, his fleet of bright-red-and-white delivery trucks stood in a neat line.
”Just about all of these trucks are usually out making deliveries at this time,” said Stolfe, who is counting on four other Connie`s to tide him over. ”It`s also affecting our carry-out business, because usually people phone ahead to order and then pick up their pizza.”
He has had to lay off 12 drivers and 3 order-takers.
Now that phones may not be restored until mid-June, he has decided to park his delivery trucks around the area, especially in the busy Oak Brook office corridor, and will have his drivers radio orders to the Westmont pizzeria.
”But I really don`t know how well that`s going to work,” he admitted.
”It takes away a lot of the convenience.”
At another business unusually dependent on the telephone-the Hinsdale Flower Shop-owner Ron Schlemann indicated the curve of declining business with a steep dive of his hand. Business was down 80 percent, he estimated, and three full-time employees have voluntarily laid themselves off.
”Not only are people not coming in, but they don`t even know they need flowers ,because they`re not getting the phone calls from others to inform them of weddings or deaths or whatever,” he said. ”It`s a big spider web.” Amling`s Flowers and Gifts, whose metropolitan phone-order service is based in Hinsdale, has had to rely on a ”pony express” of drivers to shuttle orders between the outlet near the sender and the outlet near the receiver, according to store manager John Lochner.
It might comfort the phoneless to know that Bell Laboratories in Naperville, where the digital switching equipment that Illinois Bell will install in Hinsdale was developed, has not been exempt from the travails of last week.
Spokesman Dennis Fulton said the 5,000 employees in the western suburb have been able to call internally and within Naperville and neighboring Lisle, but other incoming and outgoing calls have not gone through.
Some businesses booked salesmen into motels in areas where phones were still working to make their sales calls-at, of course, the higher rates motels charge for phone calls. And other businesses have even temporarily relocated, such as a trucking firm and a software company that set up shop in a business park in south suburban Harvey that has thousands of square feet of furnished office space available.
Stockbrokers` offices were uninhabited for much of the week because brokers could not reach clients, but the Lisle office of Van Kampen Merritt found an ingenious way around the problem of keeping in touch with the home office in Philadelphia. When headquarters finally got through, neither office hung up for days.
For residential customers, probably the hardest hit were teenagers. Adults seemed to get around the problem by sending letters and by walking or driving to do errands normally accomplished on the phone.
”Both of our folks are in Westchester, and the only way to check on them was to drive there,” said Cheryl Smith of Naperville as she and her husband, Brian, walked their dogs along the city`s downtown Riverwalk. ”Then we tell Brian`s brother in Bolingbrook, or if he sees his folks, then he tells us. This outage has caused a strange relay system to develop in order to tell things to one another in our families. The news takes longer to get around, but it gets around.”
And surely for some the silent phone was really a blessing in disguise, as one Downers Grove man realized after a few days of silence.
”Last night the phone rang (for the first time) and it turned out to be an aluminum-siding salesman,” he said. ”My wife told him that this was an emergency line and she hung up on him.”