Wireless and land-line telephone service providers in Texas said they were scurrying Friday to face the possible effects of Hurricane Rita, even as many phone crews continued to repair damage from Hurricane Katrina, which hit in neighboring Louisiana almost four weeks ago. Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile U.S.A. Inc. issued separate statements detailing efforts to bring to the Texas Gulf Coast region reserve fuel for emergency generators, portable cellular transmitters, emergency response teams and phones for use by local police and fire officials.

Mike Karageorge, area vice president for Sprint Nextel in Texas, said efforts to restore service in areas hit by Katrina would not be curtailed by preparations to deal with Rita, which is expected to make landfall near the Texas-Louisiana border tomorrow morning.

Sprint Nextel Corp. spokesman John Taylor and other carrier representatives said it is too early to dissect the lessons learned from Katrina and how they might benefit Rita preparations. However, Sprint did learn after repairs from four hurricanes in five weeks in Florida last year "that we needed a better understanding of weather tracking," Taylor said.

That prompted Sprint to hire a private weather forecasting company to help predict areas of the worst damage so the company would know where best to deploy its crews.

Patrick Kimball, a spokesman for Verizon Wireless, said his company also learned a lot last year from the storms in Florida. But because of Katrina, "we"re being more proactive in establishing liaisons with public safety agencies in advance [of Rita] to let them know where there might be service disruptions and to facilitate access for our teams."

Kimball also said repair crews from surrounding areas have been offering relief to workers from the first storm. In fact, some Houston-area workers helped out near New Orleans but have been back long enough to help prepare for Rita.

Michael Coe, a spokesman for SBC Communications Inc., the major local network provider in Texas, said hundreds of SBC workers are already positioned in locations 20 miles to 50 miles from the Texas coastline. Dozens of telephone central offices were prepped for Rita as well, with emergency generators topped off with fuel and doors fortified.

SBC was not directly affected by Katrina but sent some crews to help other carriers, Coe said. "Year-round we do preparations and simulations, but Katrina drove home the type of damage that can be done. A major hurricane of Rita"s size hasn"t hit the Texas coast for decades, so we"re taking every step possible to respond as quickly and effectively as we can."

Coe said SBC crews may end up relying on cellular phones and satellite phones to coordinate its response should other communications fail.

T-Mobile said in a statement that it was trucking in microwave equipment to the region to facilitate data communication between its cellular sites and its network switches as a backup in the event T1 fixed-line service fails. The carrier was already adding wireless capacity in northern Houston and Austin, since people evacuating were using the network more.

Satellite communications provider Inmarsat PLC said it will be providing voice and data communications to relief and federal government organizations, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Guard and the U.S. Department of Defense. Inmarsat recently realigned several satellite spotbeams to provide increased network capacity and to help ensure uninterrupted service, said spokesman Greg Kalish. Both U.S. senators from Louisiana will be equipped with satellite phones so they can communicate with emergency responders and federal officials during the storm.

Peter Siggins, a telecommunications consultant for the PA Consulting Group in Washington, said Rita"s arrival so soon after Katrina means carriers and others are sure to be on a high level of preparedness. Even if Rita is severe, "we should expect to see less impact [compared to] the scale of Katrina," he said.

A key ingredient to communications resilience will be electricity, meaning network operators will using backup generators and batteries if necessary, Siggins said. "If the operators have solid backup capacity, they should be OK," he said.

"All the carriers have good engineering organizations," Siggins said. "They are good at this stuff, but when they do encounter problems, it usually happens when they depend on third-party vendors or power suppliers. So if the power goes, it has a domino effect."

Siggins also warned that some carrier repair crews may be suffering from exhaustion from dealing with Katrina"s aftermath. "You"ve got another hurricane coming on the back of a huge catastrophic hurricane event, so the strain in terms of just the physical numbers of people to maintain or restore networks is huge," he said.