My neighbor’s tree is leaning on the phone lines (including mine) and they won’t deal with it. A couple Verizon linemen were working nearby, and I asked them if I would lose service if the tree fell. They said it was likelier that the lines would be pulled off the pole, or the pole knocked down, than that the line would break. So I’m not surprised to hear this from somebody with relevant expertise.
Still, what chance is there that the phone would still be getting power? Wouldn’t they deliberately cut the power, since they have rescue crews working in the rubble (and, until a day or so ago, a persistent fire)?
I’d love to think the grandparents are making calls and waiting for rescue. But that doesn’t seem like the most-likely explanation for what we’re hearing.
Landlines don’t need electricity, unless the specific phone hooked up to the landline does (for example, a cordless phone). An old-school phone works even when all the electricity in the entire region is out.
The old phone system used to run off it’s own power. I was in an earthquake once that killed all the power to the area and the pots phones still worked.
Some change of emphasis or detail can make most of these more plausible. For example, consider:
2b. the condo’s hinky 40-year-old phone branch exchange box runs on POTS power, is getting shorted by the mangled apartment lines headed to the collapsed portion of the building and this triggers the phantom calls
3b. The daughter is getting predictive-dialed telemarketing/scam calls from her parent’s area code, a known spoofing technique, and she doesn’t notice that the number is off by a digit each time. It’s commonplace for such calls to immediately when the target picks up because there are no operators available.
Bit of an aside, if you’re visualizing disaster scenarios, the local exchange does have to have working power for the line to be powered. Depending on how big of a region we’re talking and how long the power’s out, that truism has limits – I’m pretty sure they have backup generators most places but the fuel will still eventually run out.
Ummmm… working telephone lines ARE energized… this is … not new.
Landlines require electricity to operate, that power is provided either at the neighborhood switching office, or a pedestal near the building.
Sparks inside an old rotary phone are guaranteed, this is how the dialer and ringer work - with electricity and gaps/pulses. DTMF phones are safer, but the phone line itself still carries potential.
It is a near certainty the phone AND cable companies have disconnected their services to the site/general area.
Cable? Yes, cable coax has a voltage potential as well - certainly enough to spark across a small gap.
I’m just pulling this out my hat, obviously, but say the condo uses an old business-class or hotel-style PBX, it might store speed-dial stuff in the PBX, so you could dial “#1” to call your kids or whatever. So the PBX is making the calls based on the parents’ copper line dangling in water or fire or whatever, generating pulses it interprets as #1.
Thanks for clarifying that; I suppose I should have stipulated that in the great-grandfather post. I didn’t think of people who were heavy enough into telephony to know that a Model 500 didn’t require a separate power plug but not so involved that they realized the copper pair carries power to the house.
In general, electrical devices require electricity. Even The Thing had to have a carrier radio signal aimed at it.
Another technically plausible scenario. Some PBXs can queue/retry calls if they’re overwhelmed, ringing both ends and such. So the residents might have made a call in the last moments and the PBX keeps “retrying”. I beleive this was a thing during the 9/11 attacks. Doesn’t seem likely it would keep going like in this report but PBXs sure are the hinkiest pieces of shit tech you ever saw.
This is most likely an old analog landline. They are powered from the phone company’s central office (CO) by a 48V battery. The battery is on a float charger, so it’s always available.
There are two methods of dialing a number on one’s speed dial list, Touch Tone and pulse. Touch Tone requires sending two tones of very specific frequencies, so it’s not likely to be caused by rubble.
The other method of dialing is pulse dialing, in which the hook switch is tapped rapidly to send a string of ones and zeroes down the line. This could be happening randomly if the phone lines are in such a state that there’s an intermittent short circuit. Especially if the short circuit has just enough resistance to be near the threshold of the pulse detector.
It’s not very likely, but the likelihood is greater than zero.
It’s hard to differentiate the impossible from the merely extremely improbable, but it’s enough for me to recognize that that kind of scenario is much less likely than the ones involving caller ID spoofing (especially with your improvement that the recipients might be failing to notice that the number is a little off) and the one where the family is making the whole thing up to motivate the search effort.
I think you’re right. The “haywire PBX” scenario would make a bigger impression than “calling exactly one person 16 times”, it would be doing things noticeable to the technicians investigating the site and to the phone company.
But the other scenarios only require one person to be wrong or misguided about a subjective experience.
No, analog phones run on low voltage, there would be nothing to gain by cutting service to an emergency area, and everything to lose. Analog telephones were engineered to be incredibly robust, and they can and do operate through emergencies.
However, analog phone lines, with an analog phone plugged into them, are very rare now. For example, in my house, in order to get more accurate spam call screening, my phone company asked me to move (at no charge) from an analog phone next to my DSL line to a VoIP phone running over my DSL line (which arrives on the original analog line). And there’s no chance that VoIP line would survive a building collapse.
I remember when I switched to fiber optic, the installer removed decades of wiring in the basement and on the wall outside, without permission. At first it freaked me out (you took my POTS!) but there was so much garbage stuff there that I was glad for it. Stupid coax phone stuff from the 80s. Satellite system from the 90s. It was nice not to have a cyberpunk dystopia on the wall of my house anymore.
It could be something as simple as that the couple (or at least one of them) survived, managed to make their way to the phone, and ring. And the static could be a lot of crosstalk on a bunch of phone lines damaged in the incident, without them necessarily having been severed.
Any reports of 911 receiving calls from the same number?
Something could also have hit the speed dial, as some here point out, combined with the above mentioned crosstalk theory.
So . . . it obviously didn’t kill all the power in the area, since the phone network was still powered up, and the network was still providing power to the phones.
I feel like I’m being a killjoy here, but there are no magic phones and no magic grandparents.
Edited to add: magic beans, though – that’s a whole 'nother smoke.
Is pulse dialing still a thing in the US? I know here in Saskatchewan it was phased out about 10 years ago. It would also be one heck of a coincidence that the number the pulses dialed would be family. I’d be more inclined to think it was an intact line with DTMF dialing but the redial or a speed-dial button is getting hit by something periodically. Especially since it’s the same number being called repeatedly.
