I COULDN'T CLIMB THIS TOWER

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71340Duster

71340Duster

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Yesterday we had two scheduled antenna repairs. The first one went good at 120 feet, my co worker did that climb (with an artificial hip). It was a ladder on the tower, not the pegs I got to climb on the next job. A cell company put this new tower up and my company let them mount their cell panel antennas, I could not see a good way around, having to climb on the left since the mount split the pegs, anyway, I called it off at 80 feet after seeing a peg missing from the right side at 102 feet and no good way around the antenna mount. Maybe in my younger years but I've got this thing about going home at the end of the day!
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I painted house eaves off a 32ft aluminum extension ladder a couple times. That was more than enough for me.
 
barbee6043 said:
I say if we were meant to be that far off the ground we would have feathers and wings!!
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Yup...to the OP, better safe than sorry. Part of the ageing process is an increase in concern for our own safety...
 
The climbing up doesn't bother me near as much as the coming down part. Once I had to be rescued.
 
I can hardly even watch that video them guys certainly earn their pay .
 
65LoveAffair said:
I don't understand how people do this. I couldn't, and I'm proud to say it!
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Yeh, thats totally nuts. Something about the view looking a lot like Google Maps satellite view. LOL. And even when they use the hook, most of the time its on a peg with a little cap on the side being all that would stop it from sliding off??!! :realcrazy: Im thinkin, Hell No! I have no problem with heights, just not into falling. :eek: I love looking out the window on an airplane...:)
 
That guy is nuts. Not to mention being a little too trusting of the pegs. Senior road was enough to freak me out. I will never forget that.
 
And I thought gaffing a hard new telco pole to 18 feet was bad! And Im totally with you on coming down, I never cut out (slipped) going up but coming down you have to sort of fall into the pole and drive the gaff in to stop your decent. Safety first!
 
I've worked for the power company for 38 years, and the first 28 were as a lineman. I'm glad I'm not the only one who didn't like the coming down part! The first step down was the one I hated the worst, and then they got easier. Like Pishta said...I hated the CCA poles when they came along in the 80's. Kudos to the OP for being safe! :thumbsup:
 
Thanks for all the comments. Today at our safety meeting I brought up this tower as it is new. I didn't think we had an input into it's construction, turned out we did. Our RF engineer came up to me and said he didn't even think about the climbing aspects of it/a ladder etc. Funny those engineers.
 
^^I already told you guys what I thought of that video.^^
The reason I called you all here

Turns out it's been soundly thrashed by the industry, generally

Those Rohn with the damn foot pegs are one of my favorite things to ***** about. There's a fatality from one of those, as I noted in my thread some time ago

That tower should have a "real ladder." Damn things suck. "I guess" I'll never have to deal with 'em again.

I do admit, tho, that when I was doin this stuff, I'd undoubtedly figured a way around it.
 
67Dart273 said:
^^I already told you guys what I thought of that video.^^
The reason I called you all here

Turns out it's been soundly thrashed by the industry, generally

Those Rohn with the damn foot pegs are one of my favorite things to ***** about. There's a fatality from one of those, as I noted in my thread some time ago

That tower should have a "real ladder." Damn things suck. "I guess" I'll never have to deal with 'em again.

I do admit, tho, that when I was doin this stuff, I'd undoubtedly figured a way around it.
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Agree with what you are saying here, a lot of violations and cowboy mentality in that video but it is cool with me because of the crazy factor and someone else is doing it. We are going after the tower again, this time I'm a ground bubba, will rig an 18 foot 217 Mhz antenna for the top of the 150 foot tower if they need it. No Gin Pole so two guys up there to wrestle it into place. My company is talking about putting a ladder on this tower and how we got to where we are in the first place, talk is good, I'll keep beating my drum. We also have a radio cabinet, mounted to a utility pole. Due to right of way, engineers thought it would be OK to mount this cabinet at 25 feet of elevation, it's 7 feet tall with two doors. Guy from the shop was working on his equipment, fell off a tall extension ladder. Investigation concluded technician error. I'm trying to get it lowered. You just should never engineer in hazards, I know that's pie in the sky stuff....
 
71340Duster said:
Our RF engineer came up to me and said he didn't even think about the climbing aspects of it/a ladder etc. Funny those engineers.
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You need to "educate" him. The broken footpeg on that Rohn that killed a guy was VERY disturbing to me, and that is a situation that just INVITES problems because of the way they are built. There's a website I Google up every once in awhile that points out some of these problems/ accidents.

Believe this is it

Wireless Estimator - US Tower Fatality Tracker - 2003-Present

And then...........there's stupid crap........like this.......

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This one here troubles me deeply, largely because I never DREAMED that one of those nice big footpegs could fail!!

Tower Climber Lawsuit

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And then there's this, WHICH APPLIES to the various cable / brake / yo-yo/ fall arrest systems. You go to a tower. "There's" the fall arrest cable. HOW THE HELL do you know, that the anchor at the top

isn't damaged by rust, lightning, etc?
the hardware isn't loose/ missing?
that it was EVER installed correctly?
or in the case of the cable, that the cable proper isn't damaged, rusty, corroded?

Year After Cell Tower Climber Fell, Question Remains: Who To Blame?

A partial quote about the accident:

Investigations into Rongey’s death revealed what happened: Six years earlier, the chain mount had been installed upside down. So when Rongey attached his harness to the chain and put his weight on it, the chain popped out of the mount, and he fell.

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And then there's "this guy." Yup. The one at the top. He's dead. Not here in this photo, but later, on another climb
In Race For Better Cell Service, Men Who Climb Towers Pay With Their Lives

On a clear evening in May, Guilford was dangling, 150 feet in the air, from a cell tower in southwest Indiana. He had been sent aloft to take pictures of AT&T antennas soon to be replaced by 3G equipment.

Work complete, Guilford sped his descent by rappelling on a rope. Safety standards required him to step down the metal pole, peg by peg, using a special line that would catch automatically if he fell. But tower climbing is a field in which such rules are routinely ignored.

“Bouncy, bouncy,” Guilford, 25, called jovially to men on the ground.

Then, in an instant, the hook attaching the rope to the tower – broken and missing its safety latch – came loose. Guilford plummeted to the gravel below, landing feet first. The impact shattered his legs and burst his aorta. He bled to death in minutes.
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Oiy, Sometimes I miss my job as a lineman,....sometimes I don't,...especially after my one and only cut-out at 21 feet very early in my career. ...No I could not do that tower.
 
jaimus said:
Oiy, Sometimes I miss my job as a lineman,....sometimes I don't,...especially after my one and only cut-out at 21 feet very early in my career. ...No I could not do that tower.
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The service lineman job is interesting to me, they also have a fairly tight brotherhood in my company. Our state safety is coming more in line with OSHA and their rules recently changed to require fall protection. Not sure what that means for them, I think they were legal to "free climb" to their work on a transmission tower, then tie off. I think that's changing.
 
Here's a pic I took Friday of that same first tower we climbed in the original post. We had high reflected power again after only two days of repair. That band of yellow tape on the driven element of the antenna should have caught my fellow climbers eye but we missed it. It was down, which put a drain hole on the top of the element. The element was full of water, I changed it out. (antenna originally installed by another group)
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Nice view from 120 feet and I worked out my soreness from the pegged tower attempt.
 
71340Duster said:
That band of yellow tape on the driven element of the antenna should have caught my fellow climbers eye but we missed it. It was down, which put a drain hole on the top of the element.
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And if the dangerous things don't "getcha" the simple things will LOL
 
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