Correction: Ark Valley Voice incorrectly inferred that the AT&T tower that went down in high winds was located at the top of Methodist Mountain. In fact, the tower in question was just off the point of CR 110 near Methodist Mountain, not at the top of the mountain. This makes the high wind conditions noted by the tower owner even more concerning, because a permanent replacement might need to be sourced as able to withstand higher winds than the original installation.
AT&T Explains Service Outage to Chaffee BoCC During Work Session
During their work session on Monday, February 5, the Chaffee Board of County Commissioners (BoCC) got the time to review topics that often don’t fit into a regular meeting agenda.
An explanation for the several days-outage for A&T mobile service in January was provided to the Chaffee Board of County Commissioners (BoCC) during their Monday, February 5 work session. While the situation was explained, a disturbing concern now lingers – how strong does a communications tower have to be to withstand the winds at the top of a mountain?
“We lost power January 15 due to high winds,” said AT&T representative for the region Guilleremo Lambarri. “We don’t own it, we lease space on it and it went down.”
“On the 15th we were advised by an AT&T tech that the tower appeared to have fallen and we immediately reached out to our forensic engineering team,” said tower representative Trace Rowe. “We don’t know why it fell yet, we are awaiting the report. It’s possible that the wind event causing a whipping action on the anchors of the tower… but, until we have an engineer report we can’t speculate further.”
Rowe added that the tower owner coordinated with AT&T for the placement of a temporary tower over a couple of days. “But when they got there they had access problems because the tower fell across the access road, They had to cut the tower in two to get access to restore service, It came together as quickly as it could.”
Rowe and Lambarri both stressed the remoteness of the site, a fact that is not new to Chaffee County residents. Ark Valley Voice has already covered two tower crisis: we covered the saga of the access to and repair of the towers at the top of Methodist Mountian in 2021. AVV has also covered the toppling of the Colorado Central Telecom tower on Mt Princeton by winds topping 115 MPH, on January 14, 2021. For the record, CCT got a new tower installed and up in just five days, a record that was shared nation-wide.
“We’re checking to see if the tower anchors can be reused,” said Rowe. “If we have to start doing work on the foundations, it will take longer. That tower was a stock tower – not a specialty one, so we think we can source one fairly easily.”
“What kind of wind loads do you typically engineer for?” asked Commissioner P.T.Wood.
“We source for 80 MPH with a quarter to half an inch of ice in a normal area,” responded Rowe, adding that they do factor in prevailing winds.
“That’s a gentle breeze around here,” responded Wood.
Asked to assess their initial response, Lambarri said that AT&T immediately set up an agreement with another tower owner allowed access to roaming for all involved customers, and got in a temporary tower setup. “Salida is a First Net Customer — that’s our public safety network — and they requested an emergency deployment … It took a bit more than 14 hours, and we set it up at ATMOS energy site they are also a First Net customer.”
That same week he added, they met with the Salida Police Department and went into emergency mode with the tower and because it’s on BLM land “We had to work with the tower company, to build anything to work with BLM and permitting. Because of the heights we also needed FAA clearance to create a solution.”
AT&T and the tower owner got back on air with the temporary solution on January 27 that is providing 90-95 percent coverage of our previous tower.
“So what could you guys have done better?” challenged Wood.
“The communications to our customers could have been sooner on the Roaming side,” answered Lambarri. “We sent text messages to customers with zip codes in the area, and a link to the update page.”
“Well, we’re happy with the timing of getting the tower up, but the communications to customers could have been done sooner,” said Commissioner Greg Felt. “It seems like the instructions you give out are standardized, you know the tower is down … getting the outreach going sooner would be good.”
“Years ago we observed that 911 calls would not go through when we have one of our periodic tourist overloads, it exceeds capacity,” said Commissioner Keith Baker. “Do 911 calls receive priority routing ahead of those other calls … has that been fixed?”
“I don’t have an answer for you. we struggle throughout the mountain areas during seasons of high capacity,” said Lambarri. “In BV we just launched a new site there for AT&T customers to deal with this … I could follow up on that and set up a call.”
Baker asked about the cable backbone into and out of the valley and what might happen if that were cut. Lambarri said he’d take it back to AT&T network engineers.
The bad news came at the end of the conversation. When asked how long before the new permanent tower on Methodist Mountain would go up, the BoCC was told that it would be a 10 to 12-week timeframe. “If we have to have engineering/manufacturing – the increased wind load might be a factor — it could be longer.”
Wood raised the topic of wind speeds again noting “Didn’t we have a discussion about that like 100 mph?”
Rowe responded that he could talk to the engineers to factor in a higher wind load.
“Hopefully we never have this conversation again,” responded Wood.
Featured image: Communications tower lies in a crumpled heap. AVV staff photo
Did a second tower go down on top of Methodist or was this the tower on the point off CR 110? That one fell for sure, and across an access road.
Thank you Brenda. You are correct that it was the tower off CR 110. We’ve added a correction note.