telephone sub- sidiaries from across the country sent mobile radio units to the city to provide emergency telephony services. The units were installed all over the affected area and announcements were posted throughout the city to tell residents where they were located. Simultaneously, Bell Laboratories scientists studied the impact of the fire and crafted the best technique for cleaning the equipment that could be salvaged. 1,350 quarts of specially formulated cleaning fluid were mixed and shipped to the building along with thousands of toothbrushes and hundreds of thousands of Q-Tips. In addition, a high-capacity facil- ity between New York and New Jersey, still in the planning stages, was Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Telephony Telephony accelerated, installed, and put into service to carry the traffic that would normally have flowed through the 2nd Avenue office. Within 24 hours, miracles were underway. Service had been restored to all affected medical, police, and fire facilities. The day after the fire, a new main distribution frame had been located at Western Electric's Hawthorne manufacturing facility and was shipped by cargo plane to New York. Luckily, the third floor of the building had been vacant and was therefore available as a staging area to assemble and install the 240- foot-long iron frame. Under normal circumstances, from the time a frame is ordered, shipped and installed in an office, 6 months elapse. This frame was ordered, shipped, installed, and wired in 4 days. It is almost impossible to understand the magnitude of the restoration effort, but the following numbers may help. Six thousand tons of debris were removed from the building and 3,000 tons of material was installed including 1.2 billion feet of underground wire, 8.6 million feet of frame wire, 525,000 linear feet of exchange cable, and 380 mill