Documenting an 1115 ft radio tower climb
jeffgeerling.com
jeffgeerling.com
Jesus fuck this video has me on edge. I don't know what moved me to click that link, haha.
These people have balls of tungsten, that's for sure.
Source: 35 years of climbing and 10 years of industrial rope access :-)
He's a French guy famous for free-soloing skyscrapers. I don't have a particular fear of heights but I nope out of some of his videos pretty quickly.
The steeplejack work of Fred Dibnah is quite a thing to watch.
Check out the rooftoppers who climb cranes too btw. Beautiful views. Risky stuff.
Incredible and unusual documentary, not too much vertigo. It's essentially like a bank heist movie.
Another side fact, wasps are attracted to building nests on the towers for some reason. I never knew if it was all the EM radiation being put off or just the heat.
Maybe it's like a pleasant warmth from within and they just fly towards the direction of increasing warmth. I guess it wouldn't take many dBms of absorbed power to slightly heat a wasp.
The animal equivalent to an IRB is usually an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC), but the laws they are subject to vary with jurisdiction, and their use is optional if your grant provider (i.e. NIH) or academic publisher do not require them.
I remember treatments like these happened in GP's offices in the 1980s.
One of the reasons for the extensive use of social media is that to put it as politely as possible, the talent pool they're recruiting from are not highly educated, often don't own laptops or any device other than their phone. Many cannot put together a grammatically correct cover letter or CV. There is a very high turn over rate in people with less than 2 years experience. You will be working with (and sharing the cheapest possible motel rooms with) some very crude and uneducated individuals, with whom you might have nothing in common. All that for a rate of pay about the same as Dicks Burgers pays in Seattle to literally flip a burger, and Dicks has much better benefits.
The majority of the work will be mundane cellular tower and monopole stuff, unless you are hired by one of the more rare and specialized broadcast industry tower companies. The tower erection specialists are also a whole different ball game from the cellular industry contractors and subs.
The industry in general is a frustrating race to the bottom in subcontractors, turf vendors, subs of subs, unpaid invoices, and similar. It's very much like getting into any other hard labor construction job like roofing.
For the person in the thread here that said drones can only fly to 400 ft, not quite, the faa has specifically addressed this.
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https://pilotinstitute.com/drone-altitute/
The relevant rules under Part 107 are summarized within Section 107.51. This section is entitled “Operating limitations for small unmanned aircraft” and contains a set of limits associated with speed, altitude, and visibility. Pertaining to altitude, item B of the Section states that:
“The altitude of the small unmanned aircraft cannot be higher than 400 feet above ground level unless the small unmanned aircraft is (1) flown within a 400-foot radius of a structure, and (2) does not fly higher than 400 feet above the structure’s immediate uppermost limit.”
Being on the road 50+% of the time (usually more) takes a toll!
With drones being so accessible, a lot of the smaller climbing projects are no longer necessary, when it's just inspecting the top of a small tower with simple antennas.
I'll never forget the day I was driving down the road--less than half a mile from my apartment--and making a left turn when, for a couple of seconds, I couldn't remember what town I was in.
I guess that's not accurate then.
I (along with most climbers) still feel fear though! But it's specifically fear of _falling_ rather than just fear of being high up. In climbing, that comes when you _lead_ past your point of protection (where your rope is attached to the rock), creating the possibility of falling >2x that distance. In big wall climbing you might climb 10-50 feet before placing protection, so you are risking a potentially very big fall.
In tower climbing falls aren't possible (unless you screw up the system), because you are always clipped into at least one point of protection. I'd imagine that it feels more grueling than terrifying for most people comfortable with the heights.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring-loaded_camming_device
But there are still single points of failure. In particular, the rope. It’s not practical to bring up two full strength (single) ropes on climbs. Failures are very rare but do happen—generally because a rope is cut by a sharp rock.
Climbing is inherently dangerous, but accidents related to gear failure are extremely rare. The most common cause of death is human error (particularly on repels), followed by environmental factors like rock fall.
There's a saying, though, among engineers - they can fix anything but the nut behind the wheel!
I think you learn over time that you can trust the gear/ partner / your judgement and technique. But that doesn't make all fear related to climbing disappear. There are situations in which fear is appropriate and I've been quite scared in them.
When Covid broke my regular climbing habit. One interesting part of going back to it after a year or so of not climbing - I felt some fear of heights again.
It was mild fear, and didn't have me to hanging on extra tight or something. I remember the odd sensation of observing this fear in myself and thinking something along the lines "Oh that's weird, fear of heights - I don't remember the last time I had this."
Like a muscle, if you start training to be comfortable again it seems to come back quicker if you had trained it well previously. I guess fears have homeostasis too.
The first climb, I got about 75 feet up. My body froze to the tower. I watched as I told myself in my mind 'go. Continue climbing.', and my body refused to budge. It was pretty surreal. After a bit of this back and forth I gave up and climbed back down. The boss told me "it's alright, everyone does that."
The next day I went up to the top of that one, 200' up. It's terrifying at times but it gets easier. It never got easy though, and I quit after just a few months. I thought about my wife and kids everytime I went up, and how if I splattered they would be devastated.
Pretty early on I dropped a nice Dewalt cordless drill. I was 150 or 200' up and I thought to myself "is that thing ever going to hit the ground?" I didn't even hear it impact, but could see it explode into a few pieces. Must have been a windy day.
His entire series was excellent, but the episode mentioned is here:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1339028/
(Series on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_Toughest_Fixes)
Rabbit Hole:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDLT_tower
> Replacement of the beacon bulb at the top of the digital tower was featured in an episode of World's Toughest Fixes in 2010.[6] In 2015, amateur drone video footage of a man changing the light bulb on the analog tower went viral attracting more than 19 million views on YouTube and garnering attention from CNN and a newspaper in Britain.[7][8][9] On learning of the drone footage, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) forbade any further flights; without its approval, drones are restricted by law to a ceiling of 400 feet (120 m), far lower than the height of the tower.[10]
And the referenced viral video ...
It doesn't always go well, for example the Senior Road Tower collapse.
But the vast majority do not. Very expensive to build.
I work for a team in a government agency that does engineering support for RF based navigational aids. Because we're short staffed (Congress underfunds us), everyone fulfills more jobs than their official title. (There's an elastic clause in government worker job descriptions, "and other duties as assigned.")
Anyway. I live in fear of the day I'm called upon to climb a tower because they need me to do that. My regular job is software development! Obviously I'm not going to do it, but I'm unsure what my rights are / what will happen if and when I refuse. Unfortunately my position isn't union protected because my older peers didn't sign on when the (non-computer science) engineers did.
That's boilerplate language for pretty much every job description in the United States (which is where I'm guessing you are). It isn't unique to government jobs. Almost everybody that doesn't work under super-strict bureaucratic oversight has to do work that isn't explicitly called out in their job description.
> I live in fear of the day I'm called upon to climb a tower because they need me to do that. My regular job is software development!
Your boss isn't going to come to you saying "go climb a tower or ur fired lol" while pointing to that clause. Tower climbing requires many special considerations like training, permits, insurance, and so forth that you don't have. They will contract that work out or hire somebody to do it specifically at the appropriate rate.
> my position isn't union protected
Last I checked government positions have about half the turnover that private-sector ones do. You're already doing well as far as job security (reorgs, funding SNAFUs, furloughs, etc. excepted).
I can only infer how you came to any of the conclusions that you did in your post but it sounds like you might have uninformed coworkers saying these things. If this is the case then stop listening to them.
One older coworker is quite enthusiastic about it (as a mechanical engineer, he designed some of the custom rigging), so perhaps this is a case where he does it because he wants to & demonstrated aptitude so they let him. He actually decided to on his own to stop when a recent near miss made him question "why the hell" he isn't leaving this to professional riggers.
I don't know how/why my younger engineer coworker ended up doing it. Both her parents are in this same field and I know she feels a lot of pressure to excel and not say no to things. And when we come out to help a site there's a lot of pressure to restore service. So she may have agreed or even volunteered but not for the right reasons.
It may though be a case where no one thought to mention to me that this isn't a required thing, that some are doing it because they want to, etc. My coworkers aren't always good at realizing what new employees don't know, and I'm not good at picking up nuance.
But I definitely was "voluntold" to go out to a site and cut cables, which is a specialty technique I'm not properly trained in and would've taken place outside in the elements. (Did I mention I'm a programmer, a profession I chose in part because it takes place indoors? I also have undiagnosed/self-diagnosed dyspraxia; it would have been a disaster.) Thankfully the trip got canceled for other reasons, but my point is I wasn't asked; I was just told we need to send someone so you're going.
A simple spellcheck won’t detect it but grammar check might.
Edit: the reason is probably that the writer is saying “eleven hundred”. It sounds OK but looks strange in writing