Safety is a high priority

As cell towers sprout, company trains people who climb them

By MEG JONES
mjones@journalsentinel.com

Posted: Aug. 9, 2007

Monroe - A photo is pasted to the front of the white helmet Amber Mamp wears when climbing telecommunications towers to install antennas and other equipment that enable an ever-growing number of cell phone users and BlackBerry addicts.

The man smiling on Mamp's helmet was one of her employees. He died on the job after hooking his safety line to a pole that swiveled 180 degrees. He plunged 120 feet to the ground.

His death prompted Mamp, 27, owner of a Michigan company that erects towers for customers such as Verizon and Nextel, to travel to this small community southwest of Madison to dangle from a safety harness 40 feet up.

It was a "big wake-up call. You thought you were untouchable," Mamp said as she caught her breath after the practice rescue of another student in a tower-climbing class offered by ComTrain LLC, a Monroe company that's one of a handful of firms in the United States that specializes in this type of training.

Any non-acrophobe with guts can climb a tower, but it takes skill to do it safely and to know how to rescue someone who's in trouble 150 feet above terra firma.

As the use of cell phones, BlackBerrys, pagers and other communication devices has soared along with Wi-Fi and satellite radio, so, too, have the number of towers and antennas needed to help send and receive signals. Someone has to do the high-altitude work the devices require, but many have little training in safely clambering aloft. Tragically, workers are falling to their deaths; five tower-climbing fatalities have happened nationwide in the last six weeks.

"We don't have many serious injuries. We predominantly have deaths," said ComTrain President Winton Wilcox.

As more and more towers have popped up across the landscape, some companies are hiring untrained and inexperienced workers to climb for them.

"We're in a horrendous gold rush," Wilcox said of the tower construction industry. "That's why we're killing these kids."

He started ComTrain in 1996 after developing a certified tower climbing program for another company that built communications towers. Realizing the need for a way to quantify safety training, Wilcox came up with a training manual (now in its fourth edition), testing and courses that last one to three days.

Five years ago, large telecommunications firms hired small tower construction companies and didn't inquire about the training of climbers. But now, more contracts call for certified workers to install antennas and build towers, and that means ComTrain's business is booming.

"The customer is definitely worried about protection of workers," said Mamp, whose business has grown from five employees to 17 since 2005.

Spurred by the exploding global demand for cell phones and other devices, ComTrain offers tower-climbing safety training 60 to 70 times a year and has taught classes in numerous countries, including Kuwait, China, Indonesia, Egypt and the Philippines.

A two-day ComTrain safety training class costs $795, and a three-day advanced class is $1,045. Last week three students were taking instructor training, at a cost of $2,035 each, so they can go back to their companies and teach co-workers.

Climbing up a 140-foot self-supporting tower next to a farm implement dealer in Monroe, Nathan Van Buren, 28, of Waupun, who is helping install a wireless network system for a railroad, strapped himself to a metal crossbar and waited for Mamp to perform a controlled descent with a friction-control device - a pretzel-shaped metal gizmo - to his position, and to carry him safely to the ground.

Van Buren took the class to learn how to climb safely and not end up a statistic.

"In the past if there was a tower I had to climb, I'd climb it. I learned a lot (in the class) about structures and safety," Van Buren said. "I've got three kids to go home to."

From the Aug. 10, 2007 editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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