While most telecom facilities in the hardest-hit Gulf areas were wiped out during and after Hurricane Katrina, it wasn't for lack of some extraordinary efforts by skeleton carrier crews who remained behind to keep equipment online as windows shattered around them and New Orleans was evacuated.

TelCove, a competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) in the eastern U.S., managed to keep its New Orleans switching office running but had no way of telling whether services were being delivered. "We're not sure what's out," said Myles Falvelle, a spokesman for the provider. "There's no people out there to say if service is up or not in a particular building."

As U.S. Army troops entered New Orleans Thursday, the FCC sought help from CLECs to inventory what services they had running and what their needs were for fuel to run generators. The goal was to provide critical services necessary for recovery personnel, Falvelle said.

Phone companies already were granted extraordinary authority to port numbers to out-of-state locations - something that is normally time consuming, if allowed at all. For instance, CLEC provider U.S. LEC ported the numbers of New Orleans Hilton Hotels to Hilton facilities outside the storm zone, so when people called to check on guests, someone was there to answer the phone, said Aaron Cowell, CEO of U.S. LEC.

With communications out in the most-heavily damaged areas, people were unable to find out how loved ones fared. Jerald Sheets, senior Unix systems administrator for The Weather Channel Interactive in Atlanta, who formerly worked as a Unix administrator for a nonprofit hospital in Baton Rouge, La., said, "We still can't find some family members."

For most of the week telco crews assigned to repairs in Mississippi and New Orleans could not get in because roads were inaccessible and it was still too dangerous to dispatch workers, said BellSouth spokesman Joe Chandler.

BellSouth would not say how many central offices were knocked out but said 1.4 million lines in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama were affected by the storm. This includes lines served by central offices that resorted to back-up generators for power but whose fuel would soon run out.

In areas where people were evacuated and the roads wiped out, the company still doesn't know exactly what caused some of the central offices to drop offline. "The picture is still real sketchy for us," Chandler said. "We're trying to gain access to parts of the network."