ned that it wasn’t enough to have more than one telco provider. "When you think you have redundancy, you may have two [vendors’] circuits running through the exact same trough downtown," says Moogan, who heads business continuity planning. Moogan adds that his company changed its contracts with carriers to include the actual path a signal is taking, in an effort to diversify service.

At Merrill, "we had all the classic game plans in place: diverse vendors, physical diverse routing, different central offices blocks apart," McKinley says. None of the diverse technology in Lower Manhattan mattered, of course. After Sept. 11, 9,000 Merrill employees from four buildings downtown suddenly didn’t have a place to go to work, let alone working telephone connections. The first step was rebuilding trading floors and moving employees into crowded offices in four towns in New Jersey, where thousands of voice-over-IP handsets saved the day. "That allowed us to effectively deliver our own dial tone overnight Tuesday night when the vendors were rightfully concerned about health and human safety, government services and the exchange itself," says McKinley, who can now justify expanding his once-risky voice-over-IP plans, begun in 2000. (He won’t say how much Merrill spent on the technology.)

The buildings used for recovery were also outfitted with wireless LAN devices governed by the 802.11 set of standards. With a WLAN setup, rather than running cables to individual workstations, technicians install access points that broadcast the network signal to multiple wireless network cards. That setup gave Merrill tremendous flexibility in reconfiguring office space and was so crucial that McKinley is now making WLANs part of new building specifications.

The second step of recovery was moving back into headquarters at 4 World Financial Center starting in October. At first glance, the building seemed to be in good condition (though 900 windows were blown out of another nearby Merrill office building at 2 World Financial Center). But because loss of electricity immediately after the attacks caused high temperatures in the headquarters office tower?and also because the warranties were voided?a great deal of the computer equipment had to be replaced. Most of the equipment was covered by insurance. Merrill wasted no time, moving 500 to 1,000 employees every weekend?this compared with American Express’s decision to move 400 employees back every two weeks. "Having rebuilt three trading floors in six days, management wanted to give me 12 to do this," jokes McKinley.