I was head of engineering for NEXTEL in the NYC area, the phone that had the push-to-talk button kind of like a walkie-talkie. The NYFD loved our phones because they were super-rugged and they often worked in buildings where their own radios didn't. My dad passed away in CT on Sept 9, so I was scheduled to work in our White Plains office on the 11th for just a few hours before traveling to CT. Well that changed as we were monitoring after the first plane hit, since our telephone/dispatch systems could get overloaded pretty quickly. After the 2nd plane hit it was all hands on deck! We setup a command post on the 15th floor of our office and could even see the smoke trailing off the towers from there. We attempted to setup filters to limit radio traffic to just those radios/phones owned by first responders but our technology at the time didn't easily allow for that (this feature was added in subsequent system upgrades). After the towers collapsed, the NYFD wanted us to setup a radio transceiver site right down at ground zero because they were hoping to be able to hear NEXTEL radio calls from trapped firefighters under the rubble. We made that happen after a lot of very quick planning and running around with spare equipment. By the late afternoon I had to drive to CT for the next day's funeral. I spent most of the night on the phone with our engineers coordinating recovery of telephone systems that interconnect all of our lower Manhattan cell sites. These telephone systems originated from the AT&T central office building which was immediately adjacent to the north tower. It turns out that steel girders from the collapse had pierced the underground cable vaults going into that central office and all the water being sprayed from firefighting equipment was infiltrating the cable vaults causing everything to short circuit, knocking out our downtown cell sites one by one. We had to setup microwave hops from each cell site around the towers and connect to locations across the Hudson to get the sites back up and running over the next few days. On a related note, because I'm a radio geek, I had taken a tour of the channel 7 TV station transmitter and the 350 foot tall rooftop antenna, and the hundreds of other radio antennas, on the north tower a few years prior to the tragedy. The TV transmitter was on the top floor and even included a 20KW diesel generator and the fuel necessary to run it for a day, all up there on the top floor. If you've never seen a 20KW diesel generator, it's about the size of an SUV. It's hard to imagine all of that falling straight down during the collapse!
http://www.thevillagesoldtimeradio.c...sTVAntenna.jpg