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By JIM DWYER
There is now more deserted office space in Lower Manhattan because of Hurricane Sandy than there are offices in many cities. Mobile boilers line the streets. Portable generators are stacked to the curbs. Ventilation tubes coil around scaffolds, snake above sidewalks, quiver and pulse. It is as if bodies had been turned inside out, exposing the hearts, lungs and organs that are normally internal. Of course, these devices keep the buildings running in some limited ways. Still, 15 million to 18 million square feet of space is unusable, about as much as exists in any condition whatsoever in cities like Miami, Phoenix and San Diego.
It is not enough to have generators that keep a few elevators and a bank of fluorescent lights running.
The telephones are not working. And it turns out that under the current schedule for repairs, Verizon will not be finished until May, a fact Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg dropped into a speech on Thursday morning. “That is just not acceptable,” Mr. Bloomberg said.
You can see why. Not only is it a tremendous hassle to the dislocated businesses, but it is also a ticking bomb for commercial real estate. If tenants do not have access to their space for a specified period of time, they are freed from the terms of the lease. How long that is varies, but three months is not unusual. Businesses that signed deals when rents were high, or took on more space than they now need, may be able to walk away without a penalty.
“Tenants run out of patience,” said Steven Spinola, the president of the Real Estate Board of New York, a trade association for commercial landlords. “You and I and everybody else would run out of patience.”
Mr. Spinola said he believed that 95 to 98 percent of the space could be occupied by the beginning of the year — that the landlords could get enough elevators and safety equipment in place to satisfy city regulations. There was, however, a big if.
“That depends on Verizon getting the service back,” Mr. Spinola said.
No one at Verizon is willing to make any such prediction or promise. The company reported that 95 percent of its existing traditional network in Lower Manhattan, the kind that runs on copper wires, had been destroyed when it was marinated for days in saltwater and diesel fuel. The parts of the network that ran on fiber optic were less devastated, because that kind of cable wasn’t bothered by the floods. Still, they didn’t escape: at either end of a fiber optic line is a computer that sends lasers over the line to another computer that reads them. Those computers were drowned.
That means, said Chris Levendos, Verizon’s executive director for national operations, that all the fiber optic equipment, apart from the cables, has to be replaced.
Moreover, it made no sense to replace the old copper lines with new copper, Mr. Levendos said. Instead, Verizon will install fiber optic lines. Telephone rooms that had been flooded in subbasements are being moved to higher floors.
“I need 20 times the amount of equipment that I would normally have used on an annual basis,” Mr. Levendos said.
An entirely new system is not likely to be finished by Jan. 1. It probably won’t be finished within three months of the storm, which would be the end of January and a date many landlords would like to make.
“Those buildings in downtown that lost electricity and heat should be back up by the end of this month, but they can’t be occupied unless we have telephone service,” Mr. Bloomberg said Thursday. “Even today, five weeks after the storm, there are just too many people who cannot come back to work here.”
The mayor is right. It is unacceptable. The deaths and the loss of people’s homes have commanded our attention, as they should have and will continue to. But every day, new layers of this catastrophe are being exposed. The guts of the city are being laid bare, and they are not easy to look at. That’s what the people from the phone company must face in the ruined world beneath our feet.
“I’ve seen my children twice in the last 30 days,” Mr. Levendos said. “We’re doing 20 years of work. Right now.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/07/ny...gewanted=print
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