Fire Disrupts Phones in L.A., O.C. Businesses : Communications: At one Costa Mesa accounting firm, employees turned to cellular telephones.

A fire at a Downtown Los Angeles Pacific Bell switching facility crippled the city’s phone service early Tuesday, blocking millions of calls, knocking out many appeals for emergency service, disrupting businesses and shutting down automated teller machines throughout the city.

With no 911 calls getting through in areas of the San Fernando Valley, helicopters and fire trucks patrolled neighborhoods to search for smoke or flames, and extra police cars cruised the streets in case residents needed assistance.

The 12:47 a.m. fire caused widespread inconvenience, with phone trouble reported from the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys to South Los Angeles, from West Los Angeles to Downtown. But there were no reports of injury or death caused by a delay in emergency response.

In Orange County, some businesses with offices in Los Angeles were inconvenienced. Accounting firms, in the midst of the tax season, were especially hard-pressed. At Deloitte & Touche, internal tie-lines, computer lines and facsimile lines were down all morning, sending accountants to the parking lot.

“We all have cellular phones, so we went to our cars to call L.A.,” said Chris Massey, managing partner of the firm’s Costa Mesa office.

“We do a lot of things with our L.A. office--coordinating proposals and so forth--so we literally have to stay in touch,” he said. “The faxes wouldn’t go back and forth either, and in today’s world, we live by faxes.”

Luckily, he said, telephone and facsimile lines were restored by midday. Internal tie-lines were out all day, however, so workers called each other long distance, he said.

“March 15 is the last day for corporate tax returns to get in, so it would have been a big problem if it lasted all day,” Massey said. “As it turned out, it was not nearly as disruptive as the earthquake was.”

Tie-lines also were down most of the day at First American Financial Corp. in Santa Ana. Customers calling about title insurance matters couldn’t be transferred from one county to the other and had to be given the company’s toll-free number, thus swamping the firm’s operators, said spokeswoman Kathy Snyder.

Many companies appeared to have problems only for a few hours. At Psomas & Associates civil engineering firm, all communication between its Santa Monica headquarters and its major office in Costa Mesa was lost for two hours, said Joey Drucker, manager of computer operations.

“We couldn’t use our computers, and we rely on E-mail a lot,” she said. The connections were restored quickly enough that the company didn’t have to send messengers back and forth, she said.

International calls also became a problem for some operations. The Costa Mesa office of Latham & Watkins has to go through its Los Angeles headquarters to send the electronic mail by computer to its offices in London and Moscow, said Juanita Luna, the law firm’s Orange County office manager.

“We could make (international telephone) calls, but no E-mail,” she said. By 2:20 p.m., however, the firm was “up and running” as that and other phone problems were fixed, she said.

John Britton, a PacBell spokesman based in San Diego, said, “People in Orange County who were trying to call into the affected area or make long-distance calls that went through that area might have been impacted.”

He said such delays may have included automatic teller machines and other electronic devices that use telephone lines that could be switched through Los Angeles.

Emergency phone service was restored about 9 a.m. Tuesday, with regular phone service back in operation by the afternoon.

The early morning fire at the Bunker Hill office tower, started by an electrical malfunction, caused more damage to the area’s phone systems than the January earthquake. The switching facility, the largest west of the Mississippi, is a critical Southern California telecommunications hub.

The widespread breakdown was one of the worst in the recent history of Southern California phone problems, said Bill Chubb, a regional manager for PacBell.

And the problem went well beyond phones. Because phone lines connect computers, an electronic lifeline was severed.

Fax machines were idled. Stockbrokers could not call New York. Gas station customers at many of Arco’s PayPoint terminals were confronted with the message: “Use cash.”

Even lottery players were out of luck. The fire made it difficult for many to buy tickets or get their winnings. Bob Taylor, a California lottery spokesman, said that 1,200 of the state’s 22,000 terminals were down early Tuesday morning. By midmorning, the machines were back on line.

Different neighborhoods had different problems. In the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys and part of West Los Angeles, many residents could not get through when they called 911, and had difficulty dialing out of their area code.

And in Downtown Los Angeles, more than 150,000 customers, cut off from the outside world, could barely function without their phones and modem-equipped computers.

Although the Pacific Stock Exchange did not shut down, stockbrokers throughout Downtown had a long morning. Tae Chor, a broker at Olde Discount Corp., could not connect with the New York offices through phones or computers until late morning.

“We did half the business we’d normally do today,” Chor said. “We have no business when the phones go off.”

Even those with working phones were inconvenienced. Wells Fargo Bank reported that 700 of its 1,800 automated teller machines were disabled Tuesday morning. At Bank of America, service to 1,500 of 2,100 ATMs was affected. But by late afternoon, almost all the ATMs were back in service, bank officials said. ATMs--like lottery outlets--were affected because they use phone lines to connect to central computers.

Miki Kobayashi, travel consultant at Kuroneko Yamato Travel Agency, said the company is so computer- and phone-dependent that it no longer uses printed airline schedules.

“I can’t even sign in,” she said Tuesday morning. “I can’t get in to make reservations for our clients.”

Nick Teklu, who runs an Arco gas station in San Bernardino, said the station’s PayPoint service was out of order all day. The system allows customers to pay for gas with an automated teller card.

“Customers were really angry,” Teklu said. “Some of them have no cash; they can’t buy anything without the card.”

Tuesday’s fire was not the first at a Downtown PacBell switching facility. A 1983 fire caused the evacuation of 1,700 workers and interrupted long-distance service for hours.

The building’s owners were under orders to comply with a new sprinkler law approved after the First Interstate Bank fire in 1988. Although the work was nearly complete, sprinklers had not been installed in the area where Tuesday’s fire occurred. The company did not meet a December, 1991, deadline to finish the work, and was granted an extension until to July, 1994.

“They didn’t do anything wrong,” said city Fire Inspector Neal Reitzell. “They were not in violation of any codes. They have sprinklers in most of the areas and are in the process of installing the remaining ones.”

Inspectors, who had visited the building in recent months, said they were pleased that the building had its sprinklers about 85% installed and was making progress.

City building officials issue extensions if building owners have hardships that make compliance difficult. Inspectors granted the extension to PacBell because all the electronic machinery in the building had slowed installation of the sprinklers.

The fire broke out on the 13th floor of the 17-story building, one of three high-rises at Pacific Bell’s Grand Complex. It took about 80 firefighters less than 90 minutes to extinguish the blaze. The cause of the fire was under investigation, but officials said it appears to have started as A T & T subcontractors installed new equipment to power the phone company’s fiber-optic lines.

The fire severed the main power source to the switching station.