(Palm Beach Post, The (FL) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Feb. 12--Hurricane Wilma zapped Barbara and Gene Hodges' telephone service when the storm hit Florida on Oct. 24.

The fast-moving hurricane ripped through the state in less than a day. But the Hodges' phone service in Boca Raton didn't come back until Jan. 20.

"Intermittently it would ring, but there was nobody on it. It was dead," said Barbara Hodges, 47.

Wilma, which came through the area as a Category 2 hurricane, knocked out about 925,000 of the 4.4 million BellSouth Corp. lines from Indian River to Monroe counties. The Atlanta-based phone giant scrambled 800 workers to add to its staff of about 4,500 network employees based in Miami-Dade and Broward counties to speed up repairs.

Still it was a long, difficult process, BellSouth said. It took 30 days -- until Nov. 23 -- to get 99 percent of the disrupted coverage restored, according to the company.

The final 1 percent took much longer. Parts of Broward County didn't have dial tone in the first week of January, BellSouth spokeswoman Marta Casas-Celaya said.

"It's so complicated to restore telephone service," she said. "The problem could be here (at a main office), it could be at the switch, it could be at the jack. And when you ring that number, the service has to be at the correct house."

The company's high-speed Internet service also went down, though Casas-Celaya said BellSouth received few complaints. If customers called, it was because they needed their regular phone back, she said.

"The first thing was restoring voice service, and then once we have voice, then DSL," she said, referring to digital subscriber line service. "In some cases, people saw a lag."

BellSouth Chief Financial Officer Pat Shannon said during a recent earnings conference call that the company estimates the cost of restoring service will be between $700 million and $900 million, the bulk from cleaning up after Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed service in Gulf Coast states.

The company did not have a specific tally for Hurricane Wilma because costs were still being added up.

A law passed last year allows BellSouth and other phone companies in Florida to ask the state Public Service Commission for permission to recover some storm-related costs.

Large phone companies such as BellSouth would have to exhaust their storm funds and spend an additional $5 million before going to state regulators. If approved, they are allowed to collect 50 cents a month per phone line for one year.

"We still haven't totally quantified that," Casas-Celaya said. "I think we've got until the end of the year to do the filing, so it's not something that we immediately need to rush to do."

Most customers initially lost phone service after Wilma because the power was out. BellSouth's central offices have backup generators, but the remote terminals rely on batteries when the power fails. Those batteries have an average life span of only eight to 10 hours.

In addition, BellSouth couldn't get in to repair some lines until the areas were declared safe by Florida Power & Light Co. FPL's workers restored electricity to nearly 4.2 million homes and businesses -- 6 million people -- a task that took 18 days.

BellSouth can draw upon its workforce in the eight other Southeastern states where it operates. In the past, it has brought in crews who worked for the former SBC Communications Inc. of San Antonio, said Casas-Celaya, the spokeswoman. SBC renamed itself AT&T Inc. after a $16 billion merger late last year.

"We had ample manpower," she said. "You need to use that manpower as efficiently and effectively as possible. You don't want them stepping over each other."

But besides the tedious work, there were other challenges.

"Everything is running fine, and then you have a contractor that cuts one of our cables, you have customers cutting into lines as they are putting up fences, you had debris haulers overloading their trucks and knocking down aerial cables," pushing back service reconnection, Casas-Celaya said.

Frustration was frequent for people such as Ruth Gleason, a resident of a Greenacres retirement community who began receiving calls for her neighbor down the hall after the storm disrupted her phone service and the repairs proved tricky.

"We all had the wrong numbers," Gleason said. "I just kept taking the messages and running them back and forth."

Her service was straightened out a couple of days later.

Customers will receive a credit on their bill for the time they were out of service, but they should call BellSouth to get it. The company doesn't have a way of automatically keeping track of service outages.

"Unless we've physically looked at it, the customers need to let us know that they have a problem on their line," Casas-Celaya said.

The Public Service Commission may take issue if customers don't receive a credit, spokesman Kevin Bloom said. So far, that hasn't happened.

"They appear to be fairly receptive to the idea that people who don't have service really only need to contact them," he said. "Sometimes it takes two or three months to receive a credit because of the billing cycles."

Barbara Hodges said she would call BellSouth and get a recorded message, sometimes saying they would have service restored in three weeks, sometimes two. On Thanksgiving, a worker came out for about an hour and said a cable on Ninth Street was out.

"We would call every week," she said. "They told me that I wasn't the only one. I know in our neighborhood we were the only one out."

Hodges said she and her husband used their cellphones during the three months they didn't have a land line.

"The positive side is there were no telemarketing calls," she said. "I forgot what that was like until the phone started ringing."

Lawmakers and state utility regulators are pushing BellSouth to make some basic changes to avoid a repeat of last hurricane season's issues.

The PSC is auditing BellSouth's utility poles, 97 percent of which "stood up to Wilma just fine," Casas-Celaya said.

The issue of utility poles resurfaced for FPL, which said about 10,000 of its poles -- fewer than 1 percent -- went down during Wilma. FPL took an initial look at 1,700 poles throughout different parts of its territory and found that about 60 percent of the downed poles belonged to them and 40 percent were owned by BellSouth.

BellSouth will comment further after the study is completed, expected before the new hurricane season starts June 1, Casas-Celaya said.

"Our position is that there are a lot of factors that created damage during this storm, and we should not be focusing on one single aspect of the damage," she said.

Currently, BellSouth is examining the repairs it did after Wilma.

BellSouth has about 1,200 contractors in Jupiter and points south, including parts of southern Palm Beach County, Belle Glade and Pahokee. Last Monday, a crew was in Palm Beach Gardens replacing about 1,000 feet of cable.

"We've had to go back and reinforce the work that we have done and make sure that any temporary work that was done is reinforced," Casas-Celaya said.

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