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QUAKE AREA CELLULAR PHONE COMPANIES SURVIVE, BAND TOGETHER TO HELP IN RESTORATION EFFORTS

It's been said that disasters bring out the best and worst in people. Anyone who has been watching the countless hours of coverage of last week's California earthquake has been privy to instances of both. Behind the scenes, cellular operators from Oakland to Monterey pulled together and did their best to support emergency and rescue efforts; in most cases, the system worked.

At 5:04 p.m. (EDT) Oct. 17, Cellular One (The Bay Area Cellular Telephone Co.) in San Francisco lost power in its Oakland switch momentarily, and then backup power kicked in. Six other sites in Los Gatos, Los Altos and San Jose had no backup generators and remained off the air until Thursday.

For the most part, structural damage was minimal. Cellular One lost one site in Los Altos, where the antenna, located in the steeple of St. Joseph's Abbey, was destroyed when the church collapsed. More important, however, was that Cellular One switch technician Curtis Currin, 24, who was working in the battery room of the abbey trying to restore power to the array, lost his life at the same time.

Cellular One spokeswoman Caroline Casey told MOBILE PHONE NEWS that in the first hours following the quake, Cellular One subscribers attempted to make 10 times the number of calls normally made during a typical rush hour; instead of operating at its day-to-day 75% capacity, the system was pushed to 90%. The carrier handles 30,000-40,000 calls on a regular day. A week later, calling patterns have gotten back to normal, but traffic patterns have changed.

Due to the damage done to I-880 and the Bay Bridge, commuters are looking for other ways to get into San Francisco. Some are taking Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), some are taking newly activated ferries, but most continue to be married to their cars, taking up to 3 times as long to get to their destinations by using other bridges and alternate routes, like I-80.

"We have put up new cell sites along the North Bay area to handle the traffic coming from Marin County," Casey said. Cellular One brought in a few portable sites from its operations in Detroit because they are compatible with the carrier's Ericsson switch. Some of the sites are temporary, others will remain after damaged roads and bridges are repaired. Construction is being hindered somewhat this week by the storms that began to pummel the quake area this weekend.

A Cellular One customer service representative told us that while subscribers continue to have difficulty getting out on the first call as they pass through newly congested areas, especially around the San Mateo bridge, most understand the situation and are coping. "But others are calling us and asking why they still are having problems after a week and why haven't we fixed things," he said.

It had been reported that the city's 911 services bogged down following the quake, and Casey could give us no figures as to how many subscribers tried to report emergency situations from the scene.

Within 24 hours of the quake, Cellular One, its partner McCaw and manufacturer Fujitsu made some 1,000 portable and transportable phones available to at least 44 emergency, governmental and media-related agencies in the quake area from Monterey to Oakland. Cellular One is providing free airtime and the only problem with the phones in the Bay Area appears to be the lack of extra batteries; chargers have been issued with the phones, but electrical power remains down in some areas. Extra pay phones are being installed by Pacific Bell in areas hardest hit by the temblor, but none of them are cellular pay phones.

GTE Mobilnet's switches remained operational following the quake, and only a handful of its 80 cell sites went down. Landline losses and battery failure were the main culprits. Like competitor Cellular One, a sudden onslaught of calls overloaded the system for a time.

June Delany told us that because of the changing traffic patterns, her company got the OK from the FCC increase power and redirect a few of its antennas to cover areas like Hollister, which is experiencing heavy commuter traffic now. GTE Mobilnet does not normally cover this city and probably will have to discontinue service there when things get back to normal.

The carrier also is doing its bit to help during the aftermath of the quake. Two Go Pac units (each made up of 5 cellular phones, a charger and a fax machine) were donated for the duration to the California Highway Patrol to be used at the I-880 collapse site. Within 24 hours, an additional 250 portable and transportable phones were shipped from Houston, assembled, programmed and disseminated. Again, airtime is being provided gratis.

...IF ONLY THERE HAD BEEN MORE BATTERIES

General Cellular Corp. had just moved its network control center ( a dumb switch that provides number assignments, billing, remote diagnostics and other capabilities to GenCell's operations in California, Texas, Oklahoma and Illinois) 60 miles away from its San Francisco headquarters to Fairfield a week before the disaster. Calling the timing "providential," GenCell's Gary Quackenbush told us that because "every file cabinet, book case and lamp was dumped" at the company's headquarters, there was every reason to believe that a 3.5-foot-tall box "would have flipped, leaving the field operations to stand alone."

Because its headquarters building was partially damaged, several GenCell employees packed up Macintosh computers, cellular phones and fax machines, and moved to the nearby Chambord restaurant for 2 days. Workers could call out, but because of the voluntary blocking of inbound calls by the system, no one could contact them. "Mobile to wireline communications was tough," Quackenbush said, "but mobile to mobile was fine."

While on an assessment walk around the Marina neighborhood soon after the quake, Quackenbush, a volunteer Red Cross Disaster Assessment Team member, noticed that most communications took place over cellular because Pacific Bell had not yet installed enough pay phones in the area to handle personal communications. He also noted the lack of available batteries to power portable phones. "When the offer went out to supply the phones, I guess the need for batteries never surfaced," he said. "I saw phones plugged into cars and portable generators."

...INTERFERENCE PROBLEMS HAMPER EMERGENCY, QUAKE-RELIEF SERVICES

Santa Cruz, a mere stone's-throw from the quake's epicenter, bore the brunt of the damage from the initial quake and its thousands of aftershocks. Cellular One Santa Cruz, the last independent cellular market in California (MSA 175), lost its Watsonville cell site, leaving the 3 cells to cover the market. Sources close to the company told MOBILE PHONE NEWS that Cellular One in Monterey/Salinas, which is affiliated with Cellular One in San Francisco, got permission from the FCC to redirect its signal and increase its power to serve the Santa Cruz area, and then offered its help the day after the quake to Santa Cruz while its Watsonville site was being repaired.

The help was refused, however, because the site was to be turned back on Wednesday evening. Monterey/Salinas went ahead with its power-up, causing interference with the Santa Cruz system and its subscribers. Worse, though, was the problems caused to emergency workers who were depending on cellular phones to help in rescue and relief efforts.

According to our sources, phones supplied by McCaw to Monterey/Salinas made their way into the hands of emergency workers in Santa Cruz without the proper classification codes that would have allowed the Cellular One Santa Cruz switch to acknowledge that these phones had been activated. When the phones failed to work properly, Cellular One Santa Cruz began receiving calls from the emergency agencies complaining about the lack of service. The phone problem was not solved by Monterey/Salinas until last Sunday.

In addition, to handle the new traffic generated by these phones and phones supplied by Cellular One Santa Cruz itself, the system had to be beefed up with a new cell site, to the tune of a half-million-dollar unplanned-for expenditure.

...McCAW SAYS SYSTEM WAS POWERED UP LESS THAN A DAY

Contrary to what we were told by Santa Cruz sources, Jim Dixon at McCaw Cellular in Sacramento explained that Santa Cruz had indeed accepted the help offered by Monterey/Salinas while the Watsonville site was being fixed, and that the power-up lasted less than a day. Sources familiar with the Santa Cruz system reported that Santa Cruz subscribers had been roaming on Monterey/Salinas' channel 315 as recently as Oct. 24.

Tony Riche of Cellular One in Monterey told us he could not comment on the interference situation. When asked if his system had been powered down, he told us, "The system is configured just the way it should be."

PHOTO : News crews and emergency workers alike depended on donated cellular phones.