Fire Disrupts L.A. Phones, Services : Communications: Millions of calls, including many to 911, cannot go through. PacBell says blaze at switching facility caused lengthy interruptions.

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.

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. With the power gone, PacBell could not transfer traffic to another switching office as was done during the earthquake, officials said.

About 50 people were evacuated from the facility and three workers were hospitalized for minor smoke inhalation, fire officials said.

Tuesday’s outage appeared to have been the largest in the United States since a 1991 New York City phone breakdown, said Pete Hoffman, a spokesman for the Washington-based Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions, which represents local and long-distance companies. The New York City breakdown was caused when human error at an American Telephone & Telegraph Co. switching station disrupted long-distance phone service and cut air traffic controller links, grounding all departures and severely limiting arrivals at three major airports in the New York area.

There was much confusion Tuesday morning when residents awoke and discovered they had difficulty making calls across town. At scores of Los Angeles public schools, teachers found it impossible to call in sick Tuesday, prompting a scramble when principals realized some classes had no teacher. Making matters worse, principals could not call Downtown offices to order substitutes.

By about 9:30 a.m. Supt. Sid Thompson turned to broadcast news stations, asking them to air an announcement directing principals to find substitute teachers on their own, rather than requesting help through central offices. In many cases, teachers could not be found until 11 a.m., prompting schools to double up classrooms.

Overall, officials determined that the early morning fire was not as serious as it could have been.

“This was fortunate because there is such light telephone traffic Downtown at that time,” said Chubb of PacBell. “If the outage had occurred at 12:47 p.m. instead, it would have been an entirely different story.”

Times staff writers Amy Harmon, Linus Chua, Stephanie Chavez, Marc Lacey and Chau Lam contributed to this story.

Communications Breakdown

A fire at a Downtown Pacific Bell crippled telephone service early Tuesday. Here is a look at the system and how it was shut down.

1. A call goes to a local switching center. If the call is within a local area, that office sends the call on to its destination.

2. If the call is outside the local area, it is sent to the Bunker Hill facility--which handles up to 3 million calls an hour--or one of one of two other Pacific Bell “gateway switches” in Los Angeles County.

3. After fire breaks out, one of several power sources to the switching station shuts down the fiber optic “trunks” that route incoming calls to their destination.

* Where the outages occurred: Throughout the 213, 310 and 818 area codes. For 911 service, the San Fernando Valley and the Westside were affected most.

* Who was affected: Up to 20,000 calls each second were blocked immediately after the fire. More than 150,000 Downtown customers were unable to make calls out of the area. Many data networks such as automatic teller machines that use phone services to link terminals to central computers were down for much of the day. By late morning, most phone service was restored.