A BRITISH TELECOM boss today said sorry for the devastation wreaked by the phone cable fire still costing Greater Manchester businesses £4.5m a day.

But, with 110,000 phone lines still out and the cost of the chaos to the area's economy reaching a staggering £10m, BT still refused to talk about compensation.

BT Wholesale chief executive Paul Reynolds was called to account today by the M.E.N. after angry business leaders, MPs and families demanded answers on how such a small fire could cause such chaos.

The boss of the BT wing providing services for businesses made an apology to customers and said all services should be restored within the 72 hours.

Mr Reynolds said: "It is a big regret that thousands of communities have been affected - it must be dreadful for them and I understand why they are asking questions.

"The impact on families and businesses caused by Monday's fire in our deep tunnel under the city centre is unprecedented.

"All I can say is that we have been working flat out to get services back as quickly as we can.

"There are only 1,500 customers with no service at all.

"If someone had said to me that this fire could happen, I would not have been surprised about the number of cables affected, but I never expected this to happen."

Neither did thousands of people in Greater Manchester and beyond who have had their phone lines, e-mail, fax and payment systems wiped out by the fire.

Coun Richard Leese, leader of Manchester city council, now wants answers.

Disruption

He said: "There are two issues - the disruption to business and to people's everyday lives, and also the fact that people were working down there from time to time and there must be an issue about whether it was safe.

"The question is what was their Plan B if something like this happened, andthey do not appear to have had one."

Today Mr Reynolds admitted that there had never been a "Plan B" network of cables because of the enormous cost of duplicating the hundreds of thousands of cables in the tunnels.

He said: "There is a back-up to re-route traffic using network management systems. But to build two of the same systems is simply not cost-effective."

BT's tunnels were prepared, however, for any fire and were fitted with various fire prevention measures including fire walls, alarms, fire stops, dampeners, fire doors, fire retardent materials and systems to limit air intake to the tunnels.

The tunnels are not fitted with halon gas to suck oxygen out of the tunnels to quell any fire, because any workers in the tunnel in the event of a fire would die.

Mr Reynolds has refused to talk about compensation.

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