We want to recognize our countless colleagues, along with the members of FDNY who came together in the wake of the horrific New York Telephone Company Fire, which took place at 204 Second Avenue in Manhattan on Feb. 27, 1975.
It was the worst single service disaster suffered by any Bell operating company in the 20th century and the most toxic indoor fire on American soil.
Sparked by a short circuit in a basement cable vault, the massive blaze ignited three floors underground and took roughly 24 hours to put out.
About 700 firefighters fought the conflagration, and 4,000 Telephone Company employees were summoned to fix up the building and repair the extensive damage inflicted on the system.
The fire knocked out both local and long-distance service that routed through New York. It took months of ongoing work to restore full service to 175,000 New York Telephone customers.
Association Chairman Tommy Steed, then a Bronx cable splicer working for the New York Telephone Company, worked 12-hour shifts underground in a manhole in front of the building to help repair and rebuild the burned phone lines.
“The sheathing had burned off all the cables,” Steed told the New York Daily News in 2022. “It was just a mass of copper spaghetti. And even though all the smoke was gone, the walls and the ceiling were permeated with the smell of burnt PVC.”
Danny Noonan, an FDNY firefighter and longtime friend of our Association, was one of the first on the scene to battle the blaze. A steadfast champion of our collective cause, Danny succumbed to his battle with cancer last year at the age of 76.
Danny, Tommy, and all others responding that day and in the months that followed, later learned they had been exposed to acute levels of poisoning from hydrochloric acid and vinyl chloride monomer emitted from the burning cables, also known as PCBs.
While no one died that day, firefighters and telephone workers who remained for months at the site started showing signs of leukemia, cancers, and other severe illnesses. The Fire Department stamped the folders of the firefighters who were there with a red star and people referred to that as the “red star of death.”
The Telephone Company Fire’s lessons learned swayed members of the FDNY’s unions and medical bureau to demand monitoring of all the firefighters who responded to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and worked at Ground Zero.
A video of the official FDNY plaque dedication ceremony for the 1975 fire can be viewed on BellTel’s YouTube channel, along with a webinar that BellTel co-hosted on the health consequences faced by the firefighters and telephone workforce who were there. Another video shows Tommy Steed and Danny Noonan revisiting the New York Telephone Company Building alongside legal advocate Michael Barasch in 2022.
The members of the Association of BellTel Retirees salute and remember those who responded to the New York Telephone Company Fire disaster 50 years ago.
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