Some 4,000 customers are still without a telephone service following the wrath of Hurricane Fabian - and it could be several weeks before the majority are restored.

President and CEO of Bermuda Telephone Company (BTC) Francis Mussenden said technical officers and management were working around the clock to repair downed lines, and about a dozen retired workers had even returned to assist in the massive challenge. But he said some customers may find that it takes up to six weeks before their telephone service was restored as the job in hand was so big.

“As a result of one of the most damaging hurricanes in the last 50 years, BTC is faced with its biggest challenge in decades,” said Mr. Mussenden.

“Immediately after the storm, approximately 10,000 people were without telephone service.

“By focussing primarily on the main cables that were damaged and by concentrating on those neighbourhoods that were worst affected, BTC crews have been able to reduce the number of out of service lines to about 4,000.”

He said technicians had been working across the Island in a bid to restore as many customers as possible, but he said it would take time to reach everyone and he thanked people for their patience.

“In an attempt to restore service to those that are still affected and with the cooperation of the union, BTC management staff are working side by side with our field technicians,” he added.

“We have also called upon our retirees to offer assistance and we are all working into the evenings and through the weekends to resolve the outages as quickly as possible.

“While BTC is taking every possible step to address the restoration of service quickly, because of the sheer magnitude of the problem you can expect that it will take several more weeks for things to return back to normal.”

And he said this had proved the most challenging time since he had taken over as CEO a year ago, and he thanked staff for the extra hours they had put in to help restore service.

He added: “I would also to thank our retirees who are helping us to reduce the backlog of customer repairs and, most importantly, I would like to thank our customers for their patience and understanding during this trying period.”

Mr. Mussenden said between 12 and 15 retirees had offered to return to work to assist with the massive task, and he said they had been placed in areas where they were familiar with.

Some had just recently retired, and others had been gone for between five and ten years. And he said management, including himself, had also been out in the field to help out.

But he warned that the number of outages could increase again as BTC was still receiving new calls from customers who did not have a service and they were being added to the list.

However, he said no decision had yet been taken as to whether or not customers would be refunded for their line rental and other incidentals for the period their phone service was down.

He said that issue was still “under review”, as, too, was the matter of whether overseas assistance would be required.

Mr. Mussenden said, fortunately, there was not a great deal of damage to the physical plant and only minor damage to the BTC exchanges.

He said a total assessment had not been done yet, but the company was expecting to suffer great losses on the number of calls and custom lost while phone lines have been down.

Quite a number of people had opted to have their calls forwarded to cell phones, at no extra fee.

BTC said the short-term priority was restoring service to existing customers, but said essential installation work was still taking place and that would continue over the next few weeks.

Businesses are also receiving priority treatment. During the next few days, BTC will be attempting to contact customers who it believes are still without power, either on their home phones, business or cell phones to confirm that 4,000 people are, indeed, still without service.