BellSouth says they're rebuilding telecommunications in the city

08:24 AM CST on Monday, February 20, 2006

Bill Capo / WWL-TV News Reporter

Mid-City business owner Roland Hymel said he’s spent weeks cleaning and clearing damage caused by Hurricane Katrina at his Canal Street office building. The building’s 20 tenants are ready to return, Hymel said, but there’s one problem keeping them away: no phone service.

“They couldn't give me a definite answer, but it was, 'several months before we could get to you, because we lost a local station, a local substation,'” he said.

Merlin Villar, a spokesman for BellSouth, said the surrounding area did not have phone service, but the company was looking at some solutions.

Villar said the wind and flooding during Katrina virtually wiped out the city’s phone system, destroying 500,000 telephone lines in the process. Repairs, especially in the underground tunnels, have been time consuming and messy.

"We cleaned out over 400 tons of muck that was in those manholes, and it was all contaminated,” Villar said. “We are rebuilding a telecommunications infrastructure in a major city from the ground up.”

The phone company has begun installing high tech fiber optic cables that are more flood resistant, but it has been an expensive process.

“Right now its several hundreds of millions of dollars spent so far, over $600 million, and the meter is still ticking because we're not finished,” Villar said.

The company believed it lost 167,000 out of 400,000 customers in Orleans Parish and have concentrated efforts to restore service to those they know have returned.

"From the people we know are back, from the areas we know are back, we've got about 85% of the customers working,” Villar said, though he acknowledged that number applied only to customers BellSouth knew were back in town.

BellSouth has said it would like to hear from returning customers who are not on their repair lists. Residential customers are asked to call toll free 1-877-737-2478 and business customers should call 1-866-620-6900.

Villar said BellSouth already installed 200 miles of new wiring in New Orleans, but added there's another 100 miles to go, so it could be this summer before the entire project is completed.

However, for those who were told they may have to wait months before their service was restored, Villar said that was simply the worst case scenario.

"They may be given a date in June, okay, but take heart that we're going to beat that date in all likelihood,” he said.

Hymel said he recently received word from a BellSouth representative that if he gave the company some space in the building, he could have phone service up and running in about three weeks.

And he said that’s good news for his tenants.