In the destructive aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, hundreds of repair crews from Verizon Wireless and Cingular Wireless are on standby to get into ravaged parts Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama to repair waterlogged cell phone systems and equipment.

Tuesday in New Orleans, more than 24 hours after Katrina pummeled the city and the Gulf coast with 150 mph winds and floodwaters that in some areas measured 30 feet, emergency workers were trying to assess the damage as skies cleared and temperatures soared into the 90s. Even though the storm has passed, floodwaters continued to rise in New Orleans after a levee wall that had protected the city was breached in a two-block-long area, according to officials there. Officials have said dozens of people have been killed, but that death toll is expected to rise.

Patrick Kimball, a spokesman for Verizon Wireless, said the floodwaters now pouring into the city from nearby Lake Pontchartrain have made a bad situation worse.

"That has certainly complicated matters," Kimball said. "We are still in assessment mode. We obviously haven't been able to get our crews in safely" to begin making repairs, because the situation has not yet stabilized.

Flooding in New Orleans is what's having the most disruptive effects on cell phone network repairs, because the hardware is still submerged under feet of water, Kimball said. Power for the cellular service would not be as big an issue because some 90% of the cell phone towers and other equipment in the area have their own back-up generators.

The floodwaters are also affecting land-based fiber-optic telephone lines and systems used by other companies, further complicating efforts to get communications back into service, he said.

Kimball said that no estimates are yet available for the number of cell phone systems and customers affected by the outages throughout the Southeast. Officials also do not know when repairs can begin, he said. "It's really too early to tell," Kimball said.

Verizon is mobilizing and staging repair crews outside of the disaster areas and will begin moving them in when floodwaters subside and when police and fire officials advise them that the areas are safe to enter, he said.

So far, crews are beginning to go to work in areas less damaged by the monstrous storm, including Baton Rouge, La., Pensacola, Fla., and Mobile, Ala., Kimball said. "I would say that recovery will come first to the areas that were less affected," he said. "We've got a lot of people working on the problems."

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