Communications Networks Fail Disaster Area Residents

Mobile-phone providers said their service was severely limited, at best, in New Orleans and along the Mississippi coast, and they encouraged people to use text messages instead of making voice calls. Text messages are sent in small "packets" of data, using less bandwidth to get through overloaded lines more easily.

"Text messaging has been our savior right now," said Richard J. Deshotels of Hammond, La., as he shopped at a Home Depot yesterday in Shreveport, where he went to escape the hurricane.

Friends in Hammond were able to let him know that his house was spared, Deshotels said.

Ham radio operators told of people dialing random numbers from their weakening cell phones, hoping to get a signal and to reach anyone who could send word that they needed help.

On Monday morning, Sybil Hayes of Broken Arrow, Okla., got word by cell phone from relatives in New Orleans who said they were trapped in the second floor of their home, with the first floor filled with water. Their cell phone then died.

Hayes called the Red Cross in Tulsa, which put ham operator Ben Joplin to work. Joplin, part of a community of ham radio operators who mobilize during emergencies, was unable to reach any ham operators in the New Orleans area.

But he spoke to a fellow ham in Portland, Ore., who found another operator in Utah who was finally able to reach operators in Louisiana. The radio operators in Louisiana got word to emergency personnel, who rescued more than a dozen people in the house, including Hayes's 81-year-old aunt.

I was just so relieved," Hayes said.

Experts said it could be months before the full telecommunications network is restored, especially in New Orleans.

"This is the worst I have seen from an operations perspective," said Hossein Eslambolchi, chief technology officer of AT&T Corp. and a veteran of several natural disasters. "You almost have to rebuild the city. It may take an entire year."

Flooding also is damaging generators and the computer electronics that power telephone networks. Simply drying them out won't suffice. "If the water gets into the electronics, you can pretty much forget it," Eslambolchi said. They will need to be replaced.

One of the greatest problems for companies was just getting through to inspect damage in places like New Orleans, where police turned people away because of the danger from flooding and downed electrical lines.

Sprint Nextel Corp. said it was massing technicians, power generators and fuel in Baton Rouge, La., so they would be ready to roll when New Orleans is opened up.

Reed E. Hundt, a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said the scale of the damage would make it hard to repair, and he bemoaned the government's failure to develop an emergency wireless network for rescue workers.

"We always discover the same thing," he said. "We need a national emergency communications network and we don't have one."

Staff writer Dana Hedgpeth contributed to this report from Louisiana.