To achieve the fast recovery of optical transport networks following a disaster, we investigate a novel scheme to enable cooperation between carriers. Carriers can take advantage of their surviving or recovered optical resources to aid one another with emergency lightpath support to reduce efficiently the burden of recovery, which is heavy immediately after disasters. These lightpaths can be employed exclusively by the counterpart carriers to satisfy their highest priority traffic demands, such as safety confirmation and victim relief. In addition, we introduce an incentive to carriers to prompt cooperation. The carrier cooperation-planning problem is decomposed into eight tasks, and distributed to individual carriers and a third-party organization. During cooperation, the carriers’ confidential information can be strictly protected by employing a carrier optical network abstraction mechanism. The evaluation results reveal that our proposal can significantly reduce the burden on recovery and the corresponding cost for carriers, resulting in fast and efficient disaster recovery.