Faced with a massive restoration effort along the Gulf Coast, BellSouth is still in damage assessment mode, and the news isn’t all bad.

Chief Technical Office Bill Smith said Friday that it now appears switching facilities in the flooded downtown area of New Orleans have survived and will be functional once the water is finally pumped out and power is restored. That could mean that phone service to New Orleans could be restored ahead of that in coastal areas where entire neighborhoods were flattened, along with the phone network, he said.

“There are certain areas that we’ve had more damage in than others,” Smith said. “Some of those areas, if we put a CO back in place tomorrow, there would be nothing for it to serve. In New Orleans, we’ve had water into some of the power facilities and power rooms but to the best of our knowledge, in the survey process, the majority of equipment has remained dry. We expect our challenge there will be to restore the power equipment with batteries and generators.”

The switch was positioned on upper floors of the CO building precisely to avoid flood waters, he said.

Because of its previous experience dealing with hurricane restoration, BellSouth has procedures in process that automatically kick in when a storm hits, Smith said, and the first step is to assess the damage and get the networks’ operations and support systems and monitoring gear up and running to determine the health of the network and see what is happening to it. The assessment has been hampered by the inability to reach some facilities, he added, but it should be complete this weekend.

The next priority for BellSouth’s work crews is to restore core network capability, particularly service to cellular network providers, who rely on leased landlines to connect base stations and switching facilities.

“We are focusing a lot of our attention on getting the wireless carriers back in service,” Smith said. “Emergency personnel need wireless coverage to be effective.”

The telephone company’s work crews themselves are getting special attention, as BellSouth has already set up two tent cities for its employees and their families and is in the process of setting up more.

“We learned last year that in a case where you’ve got an area with significant devastation, we have to make sure employees and families are care for,” he said. “We’ve gotten good at being able to respond and set up tents and serve hot meals, and supply clothing, even cleaning supplies for people whose homes may be damaged but not destroyed, and emergency loans. We can’t respond to our customers if our employees aren’t able to take care of themselves and their families.”

The massive nature of the damage means the restoration process will be a lengthy one, particularly in the coastal areas where the 25-foot storm surge and punishing winds leveled business districts and neighborhoods and knocked out roads and bridges. It looks like two smaller COs were flooded out by the wall of water, Smith said, and will have to replaced.

“We know we have areas in some of the more coastal regions like Southern Mississippi and areas around New Orleans, where we have significant facilities damage to fiber cable, for instance,” he said. “In a couple of places, we know water completely flooded small COs. In those areas, we have to replace the equipment.”

In the meantime, BellSouth is looking at ways to set phone banks where local residents can call family members until local phone service is restored, Smith said.

As facilities are replaced, BellSouth will be using state-of-art gear, to possibly include deploying fiber-to-the-premises, Smith said.

“It depends on the type of damage,” he commented. “Our first focus is restoration so if a cable is down but not damaged and service can be restored more quickly by just putting it back in place, that’s what we’ll do. But if living units are destroyed and we are going to have to re-wire, then it makes sense to use fiber.”