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A New Spate of Deaths In the Wireless Industry
onehitwonder writes "The race to build out advanced cellphone networks in the U.S. has contributed to a spike in deaths among tower workers, making this one of the industry's deadliest years and drawing fresh scrutiny from federal regulators, according to The Wall Street Journal. At least 10 workers have died in falls from communication towers so far this year, and three more were seriously injured. The accidents, nine of which were related to cellphone network work, come during one of the biggest building booms in years, as Sprint Corp. and T-Mobile US Inc. ramp up major network upgrades in an attempt to catch up with Verizon Wireless and AT&T Inc."
Cellphones ARE deadly after all! /s
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
This isn't anything new. If you have worked in the industry, you know about it. The pressure and competition from cell providers to lower the cost of erecting and maintaining towers has pushed the safety margins to very thin levels. Guys climb with gear far beyond their service life and are asked to work lots of hours.
Frontline covered this last summer, I think it provides a good summary if you don't know about the topic:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/cell-tower-deaths/
A Frontline documentary last year noted that tower work is done by small contracting companies that allow the big carriers to duck all responsibility, while pushing the firms to build so fast that safety gets shortcutted. Worth watching.
Because every life is precious.
I'm ok till 1:40.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWxOx2eSqdo Free climbing is allowed by OSHA rules - per comments around 2:00.
...there for a reason.
From TFA: "Constantly attaching and reattaching a safety harness as climbers move about the tower can cut into speed." and "One project manager said crews are working 12- or 16-hour days and, when they get tired, forget to clip on safety lines or clip them on improperly."
So then the important question is whether the company is inducing this, or are the workers bringing on themselves? What I mean is, what are the comapnies policies? Are they good policies? Are they being ignored by workers trying to get more hours (for a bigger paycheck)? Do the companies even adress such things as maximum hours worked for fear of fatigue/safety? Is there pressure from the company to work more hours with fewer people?
I bring up the workers cause at my company there are people who wouldn't hesitate to work 16 hours days for the bigger check, and have actively fought agaisnt hiring more people because it would cut into their overtime as it is. luckily fatigue here isnt really going to be fatal; just cuts into profits.
Personally, if it's my life on the line, I got no interest in meeting the big guy this early in my existence. My debts arent so bad that I need to risk my life to pay them off. And when I interviewed for a job working on wind turbines (that I ended up turning down the offer for when it came) one of my first questions was about their safety policies, along the lines of the questions i posed above.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
From what I understand, the problem is that OSHA cannot easily enforce existing safety standards because of the way the business of Cell phone tower work is structured.
The parent company, say AT&T, hires a contracting house to oversee all tower related projects which, in turn, hires hundreds of small contractors, many of which are less than 10 employees, to do the actual tower climbing.
The small companies are often the lowest bidders and, as a result, operate with a very thin profit margin and cut corners on safety in order to maximize profit. Couple this with the heavy pressure to complete projects in a very fast time frame and you have a recipe for disaster that regulators cannot really get a handle on.
Sure, OSHA can shut down any number of the small contractors, but they will just be replaced. AT&T, at the same time, can pay lip service to safety all they want but their hands are clean since they can just point to the contracting agency they hired to oversee their towers.
Obviously, there needs to be some more political will to regulate things closer to the top of the chain, I just wonder how many people need to die in order to generate that will.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
How do you forget to clip on?.
"working 12- or 16-hour days"
"haven't taken days off in weeks"
Exhaustion results in errors.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
You seem pretty secure on your high horse.
rewriting history since 2109
As a former tower climber / tower climbing instructor and engineering manager in the wireless internet and cellular industries I can tell you that the big cellular companies do push hard to crank out new sites or upgrades to existing sites, but it's ultimately up to the climbers / installers and site foreman to insure that safety standards are followed and gear is inspected and used properly. It's hard to read about all these deaths and injuries knowing that - as with many things - these things can be avoided. When properly trained and equipped, tower climbing is remarkably safe, there are systems and backup systems to keep you on the tower should something go wrong. More often than not climbers will free climb or not utilize a 100% tie-off system, meaning even while moving, you're clipped in 100% of the time, even if it slows you down to move from one part of a tower to another. I was climbing up until September of last year and my climbing partner and I inspected everything we used and all the safety gear on the tower as we ascended. We also checked each other front and back to make sure we were not forgetting a strap or a ring or something before climbing.
One of the amazing things about the cellular industry that I noticed (I did cell networks for about 9 years all over the USA and 2 years of wireless business internet in the PacNW) is that the cell companies will outfit a million dollar site with radio gear and amplifiers and the latest and greatest connectivity they can get there, and then 6-12 months later come out and rip it all out and upgrade it again. They then resell the old gear to other providers here in the US or abroad, ie third world countries etc. This breakneck pace puts a lot of pressure on tower crews to crank out sites fast, adding to the safety issues. All to make a buck, the good ol' American way...
Abuse my rationalization of rhetoric as either metaphor or monotomy.
How many people have died crashing into a telephone pole?
I think more then 10.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You're on the money, but it is worst than that.
These jobs used to be all in house (at AT&T and Verizon anyway). Too many people fell and died, and they paid out too much money. They laid off everyone doing this sort of work, and turned to outsourcers for the reasons you stated. Some of the contractors submitted proposals with references to safety standards and were told to take them out of the proposals, that was their problem and AT&T wanted to know nothing about it.
This problem is also wider than cell phone tower deaths. AT&T in particular outsources many of it's jobs to small contracting companies, making sure none of them are more than 10-20 people. Why? They don't pay overtime. They are hourly positions with no time and a half. The small contracting companies can't force that in their contracts with AT&T, but have to do what they are told if they want the business. Several have been sued by their employees and gone under. Mean time AT&T moves on to other contractors. It's effectively an easy way for AT&T to insure they never pay overtime to hourly workers by burning up small companies.
Pretty close. Actually, it's multi-tiered. AT&T lets a national contract, where the winning contractor takes 90% of the profit out of the contract and sub-lets 5 or six regional contracts, where those sub-contractors take 90% of the remaining profit, and sub-let dozens of sub-regional contracts, who take their 90%, and sub-let the actual work to these 10-man outfits, who can't afford enough gear or people to adequately and safely do the job. Then some free-market idiot like the GP comes along and blames the whole thing on the government. FRONTLINE has done several stories and follow-ups on this phenomenon.
Solution? Don't contract for AT&T. Can't survive otherwise? Maybe you shouldn't be in that business, then.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Reminds me of a YT vid that still scares the shit out of me.
> where they were smart enough to do a cost-benefit analysis and realized that underground wiring only resulted in 50% fewer outages,
> while costing 4 to 6 times as much to install and repair.
As opposed to countries where they went a step further & decided that the higher cost of underground wiring was pocket change compared to the impact of service outages?
It's like electricity. From the perspective of end users who need power during anything short of an extinction-level asteroid impact event, it's almost always going to be cheaper to pay the marginal cost of buried infrastructure and hardened generation sites than it is to personally build and maintain their own parallel on-site power generation capabilities. My normal electric bills are ~$180/month. If FPL charged me 2% month more to pay for amortizing the cost of burying the neighborhood power lines out over 25 years, my bills would increase by approximately $43/year. Compare that to the cost of buying even a shit generator that's big enough to wheeze and limp while powering an air conditioner & a few hundred watts of battery chargers & lights. Add in the $35-50/day worth of gasoline it takes to keep it running at 50% load all day during the outage, and even a 10% surcharge starts to look cheap, if only because the net reliability ends up being almost the same, with a lot less individual hassle.
And yes, I said $35-50/day. A typical 5600-watt generator has a 5 gallon tank, and can run for about 8-10 hours at 50% load. $3.50/gallon x 5 gallons/tank x 2.5 tanks/day = $43.75. Add up the total for 2 weeks without power after a hurricane, and you're looking at one HELL of an expensive power bill for the month ($612.50 for 14 days). Balance that against the likelihood of having about 4 weeks of cumulative power outages per decade against the relatively long service life of buried power lines, and buried infrastructure starts to look like an *incredibly* good bargain.