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Big Dig tunnel reverts to cellphone dead zone

E-mail|Link|Comments () May 8, 2009 05:14 PM

By Noah Bierman, Globe Staff

It took years to get cellphone service inside the Big Dig, but only about five months to knock it out.

A truck accident last month has turned the Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill Jr. tunnel into a cellphone void once again. And repair work has not yet begun.

“I’ve been now telling people I'm back to where I started from,” said Senator Michael W. Morrissey, a Quincy Democrat who had been so frustrated with previous delays that he sponsored a bill to force installation.

Adam Hurtubise, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, said a flat-bed truck lost a large cylinder at the Congress Street on-ramp April 11, causing extensive damage to the tunnel walls and the fiber optic cables behind them.

Cell companies that lease space in the tunnels will begin repairs on Sunday, and expect to complete them in early June, Hurtubise said. Repair work did not begin earlier because "they had to do tests to see how much was broken," Hurtubise said.

“There’s a process that you have to follow with the Turnpike and that’s what were doing to get service back online,” said Mark Elliott, a spokesman for the consortium of cell companies -- AT&T, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless.

Morrissey said the system should have been built with more redundancy to prevent a single crash from disrupting service for so long.

Cellphone service is standard in most of the nation's major tunnels, including the Callahan, Sumner, and Ted Williams in Boston. But the O'Neill Tunnel lingered without service for years, the result of failed negotiations with cell companies, inattention to the project, and lengthy federal government reviews.