Phone Service Disrupted by Overload

Pacific Bell’s telephone service to millions of Southern California customers was disrupted for nearly three hours Wednesday by congested circuits that blacked out the Metropolitan Los Angeles area to incoming calls and created problems at the city’s 911 emergency service center.

The effects of the failure spilled into Orange, Ventura and San Diego counties to some degree and created “pandemonium” in the Los Angeles Police Department’s communication center, four floors below City Hall, where 911 calls are answered, officials said. Extra operators were deployed to answer calls there.

“It was pandemonium,” said communication center supervisor Laura Robles. “We had a little over 400 calls in the first 30 minutes. People who dialed regular numbers wound up here. (Other) people panicked. They couldn’t dial out, so they called 911 to see if if worked. It was a mess.”

The operators--called “police service representatives”--said several people with “real emergencies” apparently had difficulty getting through.

“There were a couple of serious accidents, one involving a child,” who was struck by a car, said operator Eloisa Chacon.

“He was just a little hysterical,” Chacon said of the caller. “He’d been trying to get through. We immediately dispatched help.”

At the Los Angeles Fire Department’s underground communication center down the hall, dispatchers routinely handled emergency calls without delays, according to firefighter Pat Marek.

The Los Angeles County Fire Department adopted earthquake emergency procedures during the service disruption and sent fire engines into the streets, looking for possible problems, Inspector John Lenihan said. During the height of the problem, calls to the Fire Department were about one-third to half of normal, he said.

Fortunately, the inspector said, “there were no major fires.”

The disruption lasted from about 10:45 a.m. to about 1:40 p.m., Pacific Bell spokeswoman Kathleen Flynn Jacobs said.

The trouble started with an unexplained “overload” on the telephone network between key offices in Sherman Oaks and downtown Los Angeles, she said.

Customers served by the offices in the San Fernando Valley to the Wilshire corridor encountered problems in telephoning in their calling area, Jacobs said. Then, a secondary problem developed.

When people primarily in the 213 and 818 area codes found they could not complete their calls, Jacobs said, they would hang up and keep trying, overloading the Pacific Bell network, which has about 3 million customers in the metropolitan area. Jacobs likened it to every motorist in the Los Angeles Basin trying to get onto the Hollywood Freeway at once.

“There could have been potentially millions of calls affected,” she said. “But we don’t have an exact count at this time. People anywhere in Los Angeles County potentially would have a difficult time placing a phone call.”

When people from outside the county and the state called Los Angeles during the disruption, they normally got a busy signal, Jacobs said. There is no way of knowing how many calls from around the country failed to go through, she said.

Pacific Bell did not immediately know what triggered the initial overload between the switching centers, Jacobs said. All the circumstances surrounding the incident were being investigated, she said.

Linda Bonniksen, a Pacific Bell spokeswoman in Orange County, said the service disruption was manifested when callers tried to telephone into 213, 818 and 805 area codes. She said there were no reports of any interrupted service of local phone calls within Orange County. She could not estimate how many Orange County Pacific Bell customers might have been affected.

Police and fire officials in Orange County reported no communications problems linked to the troubles in Los Angeles County.

The California Highway Patrol in Santa Ana said it had difficulty making long-distance telephone calls around noon, but all local service remained in operation, including emergency phone “call boxes” on freeways.

“We were unable to make long-distance calls, but we could still make local calls,” said CHP Officer Andy Gutierrez in Santa Ana. He added that the CHP has its own private phone system, with statewide capability, and that that private system was not affected.

Bonniksen said she had no reports of any emergency problems in Orange County during the telephone outage.

“As far as we can determine, 911 was not affected,” she said.

The disruption came at a busy time for two Domino’s Pizza stores in the San Fernando Valley.

Tony Chamoun, manager of Domino’s at 15053 Ventura Blvd., said his store took over the delivery area of another nearby Domino’s that closed because it was having trouble receiving orders. Chamoun said the second store was reopened about 4 p.m.

Debra Jasgur, an aide to County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, drove to her Burbank apartment to make phone calls after colleagues in her office told her they had tried for an hour to send out faxes.

Callers in Ventura County lost phone service to numbers outside their area code, officials said.

In San Diego County, Pacific Bell spokesman Tom McNaghten said the outage did not directly affect service. He said San Diego residents calling Los Angeles “may have reached a busy signal.”

By coincidence, service also was disrupted to 6.7 million telephone customers Wednesday in the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia, and parts of West Virginia.

Larry Plumb, spokesman for the Bell Atlantic Co., parent of Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Co., said the trouble began in Baltimore during a routine modification of equipment procedure.

The problem affected most local calls and left outbound long-distance service sporadic. Inbound calls appeared to be functioning normally.

Joseph Deoudes of District Courier Services in Washington, who said his messengers normally make 300 to 350 deliveries a day, made only 50 deliveries after 11 a.m. Wednesday.

“I took some walkie-talkies from messengers and put them in the offices of some of my biggest clients to try to minimize our losses, but we lost a lot of money,” Deoudes said.

Calls between the White House, Pentagon and other agencies were not affected by the outage. Neither were calls to 911.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Alfred C. Sikes promised to determine the cause of the disruption. He said initial reports indicate the trouble “may be both network and software problems.”

Times staff writers Bill Billiter in Orange County, Jeanette Avent in San Diego County, Don Shannon in Washington, and correspondent Paul Payne in Ventura County contributed to this story.