A Look inside Verizon's Flooded Communications Hub

Eleven years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Verizon Communications is once again scrambling to repair severe damage to a key switching facility inside its historic headquarters building in lower Manhattan.

The massive facility for interconnecting key communications lines sustained heavy damage after planes struck the Twin Towers more than a decade ago. This time the enemy was water shoved ashore by Hurricane Sandy. The building is one of the worst hit of a number of facilities that carriers were rushing to fix Oct 31. The Federal Communications Commission said the number of cellphone tower outages dropped on the second day after the storm made landfall, with just over a fifth of the sites in storm-affected areas in the Northeast offline, down from about a quarter on Oct 30. The depth of the challenges facing telecom providers was on display inside Verizon's facilities in lower Manhattan. The company's headquarters—a key communications hub just north of the World Trade Center site at 140 West Street—was in a state of crisis not seen since the 9/11 attacks, which partially destroyed the building. Mud still covered parts of the ornate lobby. Down below, 3½ floors of the building's five-level basement were still submerged, the brackish water sloshing up the walls of the stairwell. Verizon employees said Monday night's storm surge was so powerful that it breached the protective plugs that surround cables coming into the building. As a result, water flooded the critical basement "cable vault" that takes in communications cables and directs them to switching gear upstairs, which wasn't damaged. On Wednesday, Verizon employees took a reporter inside the vault, illuminating the huge dark room with flashlights. The cables were still damp, and leaves littered the floor.