A major earthquake hits Salt Lake City, causing widespread destruction downtown.
One of the buildings damaged belongs to AT&T. As security workers enter the building that houses its main switch, they smell gas and quickly retreat.Within an hour the leaking gas explodes.
In Bedminster, N.J., it is apparent there has been a catastrophic event at AT&T's Utah center. Alarms go off and trouble indicators light up a bank of monitors at AT&T's Network Operations Center.
An AT&T shift supervisor in Utah calls the center on a cellular telephone to confirm the worst: All that's left of the Salt Lake office is a "smoking hole."
That was the mock scenario that triggered AT&T's Network Disaster Recovery team to roll into Salt Lake City on Sunday.
Nearly a dozen semitrailer trucks mobilized in a parking lot at Hogle Zoo, where 105 employees went to work "restoring" the service.
Since 1991, after Hurricane Andrew ripped through the Gulf Coast, AT&T has had what it calls the "ultimate insurance policy": the ability to restore a major communications hub seriously damaged or destroyed by a natural or manmade disaster anywhere in the country within three days.
"Without reliable communication you can't restore a community," said Jim Crosson, strategic planning manager for AT&T.
Seven years later, AT&T has a multimillion-dollar fleet of semitrailer trucks and a crack employee team ready to roll anywhere within two hours. AT&T is the only telecommunications company in the world with that ability.
The trucks, which are kept at undisclosed spots around the country for security reasons, are packed with everything it takes to re-create a destroyed communications switch: five miles of cable, a complete working machine shop, multiple power sources, enough survival kits to take care of employees' needs and even raincoats - which have proved useful this week in Salt Lake.
"If we don't carry it with us, we don't get it," Crosson said. "When we come in we assume there is nobody here to help us and no supplies."
The setup is designed to be able to remain at a site for up to a year.
Thirty-five members of the team work on disaster planning full-time; the other 70 are "volunteers" culled from AT&T's employee ranks.
If the scenario described above actually happened, AT&T wouldn't set up the at Hogle Zoo. It would locate its recovery team as close to its downtown office as possible.
The first order of business would be to reroute telephone traffic from other states that normally flowed through the destroyed switch to a hub that is always on standby. Then the team would begin setting up the instant virtual switch; it would be operational in three days and ready to turn over to local AT&T staff within two weeks.
Replacing a switch normally could take months and would require 17 trailer loads of equipment.
The team stages weeklong drills four times a year in different parts of the country, which allows employees to become familiar with different terrains, city layouts and local AT&T staff. This is the first time AT&T has held a drill in Utah, which is giving the team exposure to working in an area with cold winter weather.
The temporary system won't be activated during the drill. Last August, AT&T did turn on the system during a drill in Oak Brook, Ill. It worked flawlessly, processing 217,000 calls without a hitch, Crosson said.
The full recovery team hasn't ever been needed, though it was called out to California after the 1994 Northridge earthquake. It turned out damage to AT&T's facility there was less extensive than expected.
But AT&T has provided mobile calling centers in several disasters. It can create an instant 22-seat phone booth, where people can make a free three- to five-minute call anywhere in the world to let friends and family know their whereabouts.
"If we can get one call out of a disaster area, it prevents 10 attempts to make calls into the area," Crosson said.
Calls poured into California, for instance, after the Northridge temblor, nearly overloading the long-distance network. AT&T employees saw the situation developing on the videowall at the Bedminster center, and diverted telephone traffic around the area.
When floods swept the Midwest, AT&T sent a small crew and the center to cities devastated by the damage. In Grand Forks, N.D., the center was up and running by the time the first busloads of people evacuated from their homes arrived a temporary shelter.
During the week the center operated in Grand Forks, it processed 10,000 calls a day.
"It was probably the most rewarding thing I've done," said Larry McCarter, a communications technician from Harrisburg, Penn., and a volunteer member of the team.