The 2nd Avenue disaster was the largest loss of telephone service from fire in the United States history, until the World Trade Center was attacked on September 11, 2001. What began as a major catastrophe, turned out in the end to be somewhat of a victory for the “get it done attitude” of the Bell System workers.
On February 27, 1975, there was a major 5-Alarm fire at New York Telephone’s Second Avenue building in the center of New York City. The building housed the main distribution frame that served customers in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.
With the 40th anniversary of that fire approaching, we thought it would be important to recall the hard work, sacrifice and valiant effort put forth by many thousands of telephone industry employees who managed to get more than 170,000 affected customers phone lines restored in record time.
With a herculean effort, a project that would typically require up to two years of work, was accomplished in just three weeks.
We present the “Miracle on Second Avenue:” It was a disaster that struck customers of the New York Telephone Company, but the disaster response was massive and on a national scale by operating companies and their staff from all across the U.S. It was a nationwide effort on the part of The Bell Company and Western Electric to get the phones across key parts of New York City to buzz again.
The five-alarm fire took 700 New York City Firefighters and 16 hours to extinguish. Over 235 firefighters were injured as the huge blaze practically shut down the parts of the city with its dark smoke clouds, closing nearby Stuyvesant High School and forcing patients at the New York Ear and Eye Infirmary to be evacuated.
“It’s unbelievable. It’s like a movie. It’s the fire in the phone company down there. It’s a very smoky fire. The smoke extends all the way down to Queens,” said radio journalist George Meade – who was reporting from a helicopter above the disaster site.
Once the fire was controlled, the true scope of its damage to the New York telephone system was revealed. A 300-block area was left isolated without any phone connections at all. The first two floors of the 2nd Avenue Bell Building were destroyed, ruining the entire main distributing frame, 31,000 switches, and 208 cables in the vault were charred and melted. Four panel offices were left in ruins, the power plant was gone, and the carrier center was destroyed.
Then New York Telephone Vice President Lee Oberst made the bold promise to restore the 170,000 lines within three weeks. This was an unthinkable feat, since during that time a project of that size could take up to two years.
The first order of business was to send a team of Bell Lab scientists in to assess damage and offer solutions as to how to salvage and clean equipment, fix structural damage, switch transmission power, and reroute calls. After an action plan was quickly made, it was a nationwide effort between The Bell System and Western Electric to repair the damage.
Within hours of the fire, 4,000 workers were brought in from across the state and from operating companies throughout the country to repair the 2nd Avenue building. New York Telephone splicers, linemen, building engineers, and supervisors worked hand and hand with Western Electric installers, Bell Lab technicians, and the Empire City Subway Company and so many more industry professionals.
The clean-up effort demanded thousands of gallons of water be removed from the building. Torches were used to cut away unsalvageable equipment, 16 million switch contacts and relays were cleaned with cotton swabs dipped in a chemical recommended by the Bell scientists, and over the course of six days, millions of feet of cable were removed from the vault.
Within days, water, heat, lights and electric were restored to the building, resulting in a chorus of cheers from the workers. The workers served in 12-hour shifts, 24 hours a day to repair the damage, with as many as 2,000 workers at a time working in the building. The vault in particular saw harsh, overcrowded working conditions, with hundreds of men crammed elbow to elbow in the tight space.
However, they pressed on to get their jobs done. “It’s so crowded down there that if you get up for a minute, everybody takes one more inch of elbow room and the space you were working in closes up like a trap door,” reported splicer John Bliefernich. Another major project was securing a main frame, which would typically take six months to build. However, one was found and rerouted from California to Manhattan.
The 32,000- pound machine was shipped on three charter flights to New York. Though it typically took weeks to secure a frame, the massive and driven workforce installed it within a day.
Throughout the upcoming weeks, Western Electric would ship 3,000 tons of equipment and material. This included 525,000 linear feet of exchange cable and 380 million conductor feet of cable and wire. “It is astounding. It boggles the mind to think the work that goes on here,” said switchman Ed McCallum.
The effort caused telephone company workers all over the nation to stop their own projects to send their vital equipment and materials to the 13 Street and 2nd Avenue emergency. These workers deserve credit for the assistance. Besides the massive effort to fix the phone system, there was also an effort on The Bell Company to support those who had lost phone lines. 400 mobile pay phone units were rolled out onto city streets and situated around emergency phones – portable store fronts and sidewalk units- scattered throughout 32 locations in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
An emergency message center delivered 8,000 messages a week to those customers left without phone service. The Bell Pioneers visited the elderly and infirmed who were otherwise isolated and unable to leave their homes.
By the end of the three weeks, the amount of work done was astounding:
- 6,000 tons of debris was removed after the fire;
- 2 billion feet of new wire was placed underground;
- More than 350 cables with up to 2,400 wires each were placed and spliced in the vault;
- More than five million wires were spliced;
- 6 million switch contacts and 10 million relays were cleaned;
- 6 million feet of cross-connect frame wire was run.
Also 10,000 truck lines needed to be rerouted, which required the cooperation of virtually every central office in New York City. Former Bell Company President William Ellinghaus summed up the three weeks perfectly, saying “The whole Second Avenue effort represents a magnificent example of the Bell System ingenuity and know-how.
We had help from coast to coast. Western Electric and Bell Labs specialists were on the scene before the fire was out. This job would normally take 18 months or longer. We did it in three weeks.”
The three-week project was so massive in size and scope that upon its completion, it was dubbed “The Miracle of 2nd Avenue.” However, the true miracle moment for the 170,000 customers left without service was the moment their phone rang for the first time in weeks, reconnecting them to the world they were previously isolated from.
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