[TowerTalk] Tower Climbing Business

[Peter Sundberg]

Greg,

The only thing I can say is that it's been a while since I heard of such
stupidity as you tell in your story.  Especially the part about working
'round the clock' totally exhausted on the tower... doing this has nothing
to do with being a tough guy, to me it is just plain stupidity.

Glad our tower crews over here use more common sense...
And we build equally tall towers.. with similar equipment on them.

73/Peter SM2CEW




 


At 23:53 2003-06-26 , you wrote:
>
>On Thu, 26 Jun 2003 mrb188 at bellsouth.net wrote:
>>
>> I am interested in anyone that climbs towers as a partime or fulltime job.
>> Specifically about rates per foot, insurance info, and etc.  I am doing
this
>> as a partime job( I am a career firefighter-emt) and would like info from
>> someone with more experience.  I have worked for a company as a line
technician and was responsible for a 500ft receiver site and enjoyed it
quite a bit.  Any info will be greatly appreciated.
>
>I worked for Valcom, Inc for three months during the summer of 1999.
>I mainly installed radios, however had exposure to the tower side of
>things. While out on projects I was able to view a fair amount of other
>tower companies and I found that Valcom was the best outfitted, we had
>excellent trucks, we had excellent safety gear, Valcom hired competent
>crane operators, etc. However, things were nothing to close to safe.
>
>The tower climbing industry is a very dangerous field to get into. I
>believe I have the academic and professional backing to assert this.
>I am currently obtaining my BS in Occupational Safety and my father has
>been in the field of Industrial, Commerical, and Construction safety for
>his 35 year career. I have studied countless fall fatalities in school,
>how they occur, how to prevent them, what factors limit and aggregate
>them.
>
>When you train, they train you proper techniques: three points of contact,
>constant, villigant, 100% fall projection, proper use of your positioning
>lanyard, proper use of your other gear (including RF monitors, etc). You
>feel very comfortable going into the field with what the safety team
>teaches you, with the work load you feel you are going to get.
>
>Than you go to work.
>
>Work is nothing like the office.
>
>Tower climbers are a hard group of people. Everyone carried weapons,
>everyone had egos the size of mountains, and scars from injuries. You
>have to prove yourself when you get out there. They are not willing to
>accept you as part of your crew until you show them that you are stupidly
>unafraid of heights. This makes the attrition rate extremely, extremely,
>high with certain crew leaders.
>
>Theres various ways that a crew leader can harrass you on a tower. He
>can constantly give you chores to "cross members", which involves the
>switching of sides on a self supporting tower. This makes your heart
>drop and your legs become jelly when you first do it. You practice
>back at the office at 30', but when you go out into the field, you do it
>at 350'. Large, large self supports have breadth to them. I am 5'11"
>and I would place my boots on the crossing member of steel, than reach
>my hands up and just barely grab the top of the X. You will walk toe
>to heel, things getting smaller and smaller, until you reach the point
>of the X. You than have to switch fall protection sides, rewrap it,
>realign yourself, and return. Let me stress again, this is not cake at
>350', no matter how immune to heights you are.
>
>Besides cross members, you can become involved in situtations were you
>are forced to actually lower yourself down by your fall protection and
>dangle, out beyond the tower, at extreme height. Your fall protection
>is designed to rip out when it reaches a certain treshold, therefore
>you are pushing this limit, as well as breaking a set rule of fall
>protection--never load it. However, most tower companies do not setup
>or train individuals to install static rappelling and ascension systems.
>It's not intutively straightforward, it requries extra gear, and most
>importantly, "you don't have time to do that shit." So you get on your
>fall protection, lower yourself, make the adjustment, climb it back up
>like in high school gym, hope to grab the tower, secure yourself, be
>okay.
>
>During all this, if you show fear, if you do not execute it with fluidity
>you are degraded in the eyes of others and get assigned the horrible
>jobs on the tower. Sometime, go look at the base of a large self
>supporting tower, and look at every single bolt on it. Than, think to
>yourself, how in the world would you get to X bolt that seems impossibly
>far out there. It's done, trust me.
>
>To tighten a bolt out at distance you might have to walk on a 3" piece
>of steel, 150' in the air. If you fall, you have fall protection, but
>falling into your fall protection is a horrible experience. If you fall
>while on that piece of steel, you will immediately drop six feet, than
>your protection will rip out and you'll fall two to three more feet, as a
>way to disspiate the energy over distance and time. This seems nominally
>okay, but if you look below yourself you see that a 10' fall will smack
>you into another piece of steel, than the swing will smack you into
>another. Frightently  enough, not too many tower companies train other
>employees how to save a person unconscious in a strange position, dangling
>from their protection.
>
>Emergency responders very often do not know how to climb, or are not
>setup to safely, so will not. At Valcom, 10 months before I was hired
>on a worker was not statically attached to the tower, and through a
>series of mistakes which I will not publically make available because
>there is a lot of honor (and honestly, respect for the fallen and his
>crew) fell from 450' to 150'. He landed on a microwave ice platform that
>was protecting a big Andrew dish. He died there from his injuries. This
>was a combination of factors, but one noteable was that the responders
>where unable to ascend the tower to preform life saving medical
>assistance.
>
>While I was there, for 90 days, three serious accidents happened. A kid
>my age (near 20) lost his finger when the cross members of a self
>supporting tower came together like scissors on his hand. A experienced
>crew lead was raising a platform on a monopole from a cat head and the
>wire rope snapped. He turned his back, and 300' of hyper-tensioned wire
>rope whiplashed up and down his back. He was hospitalized. Another guy
>was on a rooftop sighting microwave dishes and fell off the roof, landed
>on scrap wood, on a exposed nail. It went through his back and punctured
>his lung, his lung collapsed.
>
>These sort of injuries occur to the best, to the worst, to afraid, and to
>the confident. However, you usually don't get hurt as much if you are
>afraid, if you constantly pay heed to your protection rules and you don't
>do anything more stupid than you have to.
>
>I would always ask guys I worked with if they had ever fallen into their
>fall protection, almost all of them said yes. Some of them had stories
>that would put hair on anyones chest just from hearing them. I was shocked
>how consistanly people answered yes though. Falling into your protection
>means you made a mistake, that you would have died had that been a
>conventional belt with only a positioning system. This is one of the
>honest, everyman, factors that makes me preach until I go horse about
>good gear. These guys, doing this everyday, knowing their stuff made
>mistakes. What makes you think you won't? If their positioning systems
>failed, why wouldn't yours? They didn't die, but you probably would
>have.
>
>The most noteable story I remember hearing is of a guy thinking he had
>his right hand protection attached (therefore safe) and was attaching
>his left. He felt during the manuever. He failed, fell, fell, and finally
>one arm of his fall protection smashed against the tower and latched. He
>was slammed against the tower, and was generally uninjured, save bruised
>ribs and cuts. He said he clicked in his positioning system. Collected
>himself for about 10 minutes, than climbed back up and kept working.
>
>Even if you somehow beat the cheer chance that is involved in this
>activity, you will not beat the work schedule, the traveling, the guys,
>the grinding.
>
>Everyone that I knew who worked in the tower industry lived in a hotel,
>or had them as a second address. I went up to Fort Wayne, Indiana for
>a push of Horizon (yes, Horizon, not Verzion) communications. They had
>a new tower nextwork that had to go live before a certain date, for
>some event trigger. I worked 110 hours weeks, until I could take it no
>longer and quit. A 110 hour week is waking up at 6am, working until 9,
>10, or 11 with floodlights, eating, than going to sleep. Seven days a
>week. I worked so much that I couldn't breathe, I couldn't see, I slept
>in hotel rooms where bugs crawled all over me and I was so exhausted I
>didn't care, I didn't care. I slept with my boots on, wore the same
>clothes. I'd sit up late at night and talk this girl who was at the
>main desk. She was the only thing I had. Somehow she knew this
>and comforted me a lot. I knew if I had anything at home, or anyone
>that I cared for I'd be destroyed. I saw most of the people I worked
>with destroying their families and relationships because of their job.
>
>While working all these hours I did stupid things. I inverted the power
>on 30,000 dollar radios. I sometimes would miss the shrink wrap jacket
>and cut myself. Once I did it almost to the bone. I sucked the blood
>off, wrapped it with electrical tape, and kept going. Going to the
>hospital for a skin laceration would have been laughable, out there,
>like that.
>
>If you're on a tower, exhausted, worn out, you fail. Imagine being on
>the tower in your back yard from 6am until 10pm, with one thirty minute
>break. Imagine urinating off the thing, imagine hearing "headache" and
>making your body very small so you don't get hit by the falling cresent
>wrench. When 10am comes, and you're at 60' from being at 375' you feel
>like you're on the ground. You no longer attach fall protection, or say,
>you might not one time out of a hundred, out of a thousand, you inject
>risk, "needless risk" that will happen, and has to happen because your
>tired, you want to get off that damn thing, your hands are bleeding.
>
>Honestly, theres a million reasons to not get into commerical tower
>construction. Monopoles settle, you drop 8" while working on them (this
>scares the shit out of you).  It gets cold, hardline connectors require
>fingers, not gloves. It gets hot. It gets lonely. It gets bloody. It
>gets dirty. It doesn't pay well.
>
>I was paid $9/hr to do all this. I would take home $1200 a week, after
>taxes. I could get $300 cash a week in per diem. I lived to be on or
>at the base of towers. Seeing them would make me sick.
>
>The guys that work on these things are not heros, they are not romantic,
>they are tough, they are strong, but they are a out of luck lot.
>
>I always thought 1000' foot guyed towers were amazing. Amazing until I
>saw the commerical version of the gin pole. It basically is a 100' section
>of Rohn 55G. Imagine moving your 100' tower around, up and down the tower
>with chains, with blocks of wood. There was a procedure called jumping the
>gin which I never saw done, however, it impressed even the most hardcore
>of the group. Those who had done it were in their own class, respected.
>Supposely, when the gin pole is raised it goes roughly. I'm not positive
>why, but I think it evolves around the gin pole having to be kept from
>the tower with blocks, while its in a vertical motion. They said people
>got their hands mashed, legs broken in it. Everyone was happy when the
>gin pole stayed in the back of the lot and didn't get loaded onto a
>trailer.
>
>You'd usually not get any help from anyone back at the office. When we
>didn't have a key to a cell site they'd tell us, "you got tools, take
>the gate apart." Once I drove into a newly ground worked site towards
>the evening to install radios. I installed the radios with a guy from
>this temp agency I was training, everything went well, than we got back
>in our truck. Nothing really happened. We got out saw truck had sunk into
>the gravel, to its axels. We tried to get a bulldozer working, but didn't
>have the key and couldn't force it with a screw driver like you sometimes
>can, so we had to dig that F550 V10 9,500 lbs of crap in the back (I
>weighted it at a gravel quarry once) for four hours, well past dark.
>We'd dig, hit the engine, than dig more.
>
>Namely, working in the tower industry is hard, it's dangeous, it's scary,
>and it isn't Ham Radio. The towers we personally own are small, delicate,
>easy to install. Incredibly easy. The things that XX does for Ham towers
>is starting to be what commerical boys do. You basically start working
>after your jaw has dropped.
>
>If you really want to hire on, ask about their injury rates, ask about
>what gear they issue, ask about what you will drive, how much you will
>drive, what your per diem will be, how you will be assigned with crew
>leaders, how the attrition rate is, how many hours you will work max,
>under extreme load, how they eat, how they train, how many of them are
>out on bail (this last one, really, isn't much of a joke-- crew lead
>would always ask if anyone was on probation when we'd cross a state
>line).
>
>Remember this-- I'd never let anyone I loved do commerical tower work.
>Commerical tower work was so dangerous that it made me want to dedicate
>my life to safety and saving people. Commerical tower work can be done
>safely, but most of the time, it is not, even by people with good
>intentions and all the wonderful will in the world.
>
>If you want more stories, buy me a beer at Dayton. I have tons.
>
>Be careful, be safe, all of you.
>
>73 Greg/KE9R
>KE9R.com
>
>(Thanks for putting up with my grammar and my spelling. I wrote this
>very quickly in Pine and don't have checkers.)
>
>_______________________________________________
>
>See: http://www.mscomputer.com  for "Self Supporting Towers", "Wireless
Weather Stations", and lot's more.  Call Toll Free, 1-800-333-9041 with any
questions and ask for Sherman, W2FLA.
>
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