SUN CITY CENTER, FLA. - The first lightning bolt cracked in the dark clouds a few hundred yards above John Jacobs’ head as he worked atop a 200-foot cell-phone tower in south Hillsborough County.

With wind swirling and sheets of rain pouring over him, Jacobs kept bolting together thin steel beams while long, white cellular transmitters buzzed around his head, relaying calls, text messages and BlackBerry e-mails in a six-mile zone along Interstate 75.

Then a second lightning bolt crashed closer, then a third even closer. That persuaded Jacobs, a 14-year tower veteran, to tie up his equipment and climb down the thin, foot-peg ladder rungs one by one to the gravelly ground below.

“I don’t care about the wet,” Jacobs said, shaking water off his soaked safety harness. “But lightning was starting to hit all four sides around.”

This job that Jacobs does almost every day has emerged as the most lethal in America.

One to four workers on cell towers die monthly in this tiny corner of the high-tech world as America’s demand for the latest wireless gadgets runs headlong into the relatively low-tech safety employed by workers climbing hundreds of feet aloft. The vast majority of U.S. cell-tower climbers work for little-regulated, mom-and-pop outfits subcontracted by big wireless companies.

Despite some recent safety improvements, the rate of lethal accidents among these about 9,800 workers is higher than with loggers, coal miners or the offshore fishermen glorified on cable-television shows.

According to statistics cobbled

together by industry groups, 10 workers died in 2004, 48 in 2005, 18 in 2006, and eight so far in 2007. Some workers fell 80 feet to their deaths; some fell 1,100 feet, likely reaching 125 mph.

Florida has become an especially dangerous environment, as companies contract more workers to brace towers against hurricanes and add capacity for a market hungry for cell-phone service.

“The tragedy is that any small infraction becomes catastrophic,” said Winton Wilcox, the president of the industry’s only official tower-training group, ComTrain LLC of Monroe, Wis.

There are some efforts by federal regulators to speak to the risks, but with ever more demand for new multimedia wireless links, Wilcox and others worry more cell-tower workers will die.

Besides lightning risk, Wilcox said, nearly all fatalities come from falling after workers did not use safety clips, or they mistakenly clipped to a too fragile point, or their gear failed amid a fall.

Federal investigations are ongoing, but the industry group Wireless Estimator has recorded a string of deaths, including:

❑ June 2006: David Brown, 30, fell an estimated 500 feet to his death in a rural area near Pensacola named Bonifay. “This was going to be his last day of work there,” said Brown’s mother Bonnie Melton. “He was going to quit and go back to college.... He planned to take care of his kids and pay off some bills.”

❑ May 2006: In Oakland, Iowa, three workers, ages 57, 27, and 19, fell 1,100 feet when a support line failed. They included the owner of the tower-repair company.

❑ July 2007: In Eudora, Kan., outside Lawrence, two workers, ages 54 and 33, fell an estimated 500 feet when a bucket holding them broke.

Almost no aspect of tower work is easy, even for the seemingly brave and fit, said Mike West, 52, a climbing instructor, rescue worker and the owner of Florida Telecom, based in Jacksonville.

“A lot of people think they’re in good physical shape, but lifting your whole body, plus a 20-pound climbing harness, tools and supplies - 100 feet straight up without stopping - the next morning you’d hardly get out of bed,” West said.

Once up on a tower, workers stand on metal rails and let go with both hands to work. “I’ve seen people so afraid they can’t let go.”

Climbers typically have two 6-foot-long lanyards. To move, they unhook one lanyard, reposition and reclip end-over-end to stay connected to something.

Most cell-phone towers reach 200 feet, but others on TV towers reach 1,500. Workers there can spend 10 hours aloft.

“You don’t climb down to eat your lunch. They send it up to you on a rope,” West said. Not even a bathroom break warrants climbing down. “Nobody’s going to notice you going up there.”

Lightning poses its own risk, especially in Florida. Raphael Nadal was on a tower last month that was hit twice within an hour.

“First the antennas start buzzing real loud,” Nadal said. “Then the hair on your arms stands up straight.”

If there is time, he jumps to smaller steel beams less likely to attract a hit.

Gritting his teeth and closing his eyes, he said, “Then you just hold on tight for the boom. It’s the loudest thing you ever will hear.”

Unlike other inherently dangerous jobs - miners, firefighters, soldiers- working on a cell-phone tower is a truly modern profession.

Since the invention of the cell phone in the early 1980s, wireless companies have carpeted the nation with about 190,000 cell “sites.” Those companies, however, mostly have sold their towers to companies that rent space to multiple carriers.

Those companies, in turn, often subcontract maintenance. That means a self-employed tower worker may be climbing a tower owned by one company to repair an antenna owned by another with safety wires installed by a third.

Although most states regulate professions as prosaic as barbers, states require no license to climb a cell-phone tower. That breeds risk, said Rob Medlock, an official in Cleveland with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration who took on climber safety as a personal project.

“There are some good folks with established resources, safety training and they’re doing the right thing,” Medlock said. “Others think in the short run they can cut corners.”

Medlock said that deaths in the industry attract less attention because the workers rarely work for big-name cell-phone providers. The companies may never hear of the deaths.

Workers rarely survive falls of any height. Four years ago, Michael Cooper, a supervisor at Betacom Inc. in Tampa was a hundred feet up a cell tower in Dade City working in the rain.

“I was moving from one place to another, it was wet, and I just slipped,” Cooper said, taking a deep breath. In an instant he went into the quiet of midair. “I just thought about my family. I saw them.”

Would he die right now, right here, he wondered. Is this it?

Then he reached the end of his 6-foot-long safety rope. It jerked tight but held, and he hung from his harness like a fish dangling on a hook.

He reached out to the tower, and with his limbs shaking he started to climb down. He sat on the ground for a while and didn’t want to climb a tower again.

After a couple weeks, he regained confidence and started climbing again.

“You want to be scared, a little nervous,” doing this job, Cooper said. “But if you get paranoid, ‘Am I going to fall, am I going to fall?’ then you can’t do your job.”

Knowing the risks, some industry veterans want universal worker training and licensing.

That’s in part to deal with such cases as a 2003 fatal fall in Iowa. According to state records, the manager of that tower company would first send job applicants climbing to the tops of towers, then “train after we can see if they can hack it.”

Recently, OSHA made a partnership with the National Association of Tower Erectors to help organize training, certification and research. Also, Wilcox of ComTrain started offering hands-on training and certification.

Costs for training and equipment can add up to $3,000 or more for a novice, West said, a significant investment that small companies don’t always make.

Meanwhile, the demand for cell tower workers likely will only build.

Still, many deaths go unnoticed. Despite some progress, government regulators still record deaths in a myriad of categories - steel workers, electricians, etc., - masking the problem, Wilcox said.

“They (government regulators) may not have a clue how many people die,” Wilcox said. “That’s partially our fault, but maybe a half-dozen of us are committed to finding that quantity when the majority of our industry is not interested in quantifiable results because they would like this to remain an invisible industry.”

Government regulators “may not have a clue how many people die.”

■ Richard Mullins is a staff writer for The Tampa Tribune.