This from USA Today article on the fire ( here ). Emphasis mine.

"Robert Hansen lives two blocks from the epicenter: "At first it sounded like a jet engine, and I thought there's no place we can run. We're dead. Then I heard the explosion. There were balls of fire going up in the sky like in the Wizard of Oz. We had the car pointed out in the driveway, and the kids and the dogs inside ready to go. But the fire didn't get to us. … I hooked up our old Ma Bell telephone because our cellphones were dead. They were useless."

If taken literally, that's different than capacity-overload. I would've thought the opposite ... landline dead, cellphone functional.

What am I missing?