The wind storm that hit Colorado, on Jan. 14, broke wind speed records across the state for winter storms, taking down communications towers, including the Colorado Central Telecom (CCT) tower atop Mt. Princeton (MPH). In a matter of five days, in stormy weather conditions that included below-zero temperatures, the CCT team put up a new communications tower, restoring communications to a large swath of Chaffee County.
Assembling the first section of the new Colorado Central Telecom tower on Mt. Princeton, following the storm that took down its tower. Courtesy photo.
“Superman doesn’t wear a cape. He wears a helmet and a climbing harness,” said CCT Field Technician Supervisor Jesse Bowers as a new tower was in the process of being installed. “I’m so impressed by the response from the entire ops team. Sun up to sun down since MPH failed, these guys have been on the case. (even longer for those driving from Crestone everyday to work on the tower installation.) And they’re going to keep doing that until MPH is completely back.”
Anatomy of a Crisis
The problem began on Jan. 14 as hurricane force winds hit the state. At 7:42 a.m. that morning, the CCT crew noticed an immediate loss of power on MPH, which serves about 400 Chaffee County customers. The CCT crew assumed that it had lost power somehow and were making a plan to restore power. They changed their voice greeting to alert people calling in that there was a problem. But the problem was worse than they could have imagined.
The CCT main office got a voicemail from an AT&T employee who was up on Mt. Princeton High to check his tower. He said, “I heard your message saying you have a power outage. You don’t. Your tower blew down.”
CCT Operations Manager Tonya Wyles said that “As soon as I heard that, I contacted our Director of Operations Noah Abrams. He asked the fellow who was already up there to send us some pictures. The tower had indeed blown down in that morning’s extremely high winds.
A CCT Safety meeting on the mountain; left Yuwipi Tsunka and right, Noah Abrams. Courtesy photo.
Abrams immediately started sourcing a replacement tower; luckily SkyWest Communications had a tower available that fit the need.
“We made miracles happen – it was more like a mission impossible with extreme construction conditions of wind and snow,”said Abrams. “I don’t think there was anybody in Colorado that could have located a tower within two hours, and we had the tower in Salida, from Montrose by 8:00 p.m. that night.”
CCT was aware that time was of the essence, but getting the tower into the county was the least of the challenges. It still had to get over 3,000 lbs of equipment up the mountain to an elevation of 11,000 ft. in less than ideal conditions. Over the weekend of Jan. 16-17, CCT employees transported all the equipment up the mountain to the tower site and began assembling it. The CCT Operations team had to dismantle the old tower, assemble the new tower, and replace the individual radios over the next week to restore service.
“The challenges – the whole thing was insane,” said Abrams. “We had to send two guys ahead in the snowcat just to clear the road. Then we proceeded to disassemble the new tower to get it on a trailer that fits a snowcat to get it up the mountain. Then we used an ATV with tracks on it to shuttle people and stuff up and down. We had seven guys up there working on the install. We disassembled the old tower to get it on a loader to get it down. That was hairy; we had to get chains from Denver to get the loader back down on the narrow road.”
The new CCT Mount Princeton tower was put up in less than five days. Courtesy photo
By Monday, Jan 18, CCT had restored service to about two thirds of the offline customers. By Wednesday, Jan 20 CCT had more than 85 percent of its customers online. By the end of day on Thursday, Jan 21 all affected customers had been restored.
How High was the Wind?
There is no wind speed technology up at the towers midway up Mt. Princeton, so no one knows the exact force of the wind that hit the tower the morning of Jan. 14.
“We don’t know exactly what the wind was, but it had to be over 100-115 MPH” said Abrams. “Based on the engineering – the tower that was there was engineered for 150-year winds over 100 MPH. For the wind to take it down, I can say that the wind pushed the engineering specs.”
The CCT crew coming down the mountain following the wind storm that took out their communications tower. Courtesy photo.
The CCT replacement tower is much stronger than the old tower. “The old tower was an angle iron tower; it’s hollow. This new tower is a stronger, solid pipe tower and it’s a lot heavier, said Abrams. “It’s engineered for a lot higher winds, it’s much higher magnitudes of strength.”
Abrams says his crew’s work to get the new tower up was a team effort. “My team really busted it out, they worked nonstop, as much as we could … it was challenging, but our guys are well trained.”
CCT has been serving Chaffee County for eight years.
“Being in Colorado and in the mountains and serving Internet this way, we have to be extra careful of wind, and elevation conditions… we do have backup systems,” said Abrams. “We first had to learn the best way to optimize our towers…things happen, especially weather, winter, lightning strikes, wildfire. It’s been challenging these last few years to serve, without putting our crews in harm’s way.”
Featured image: The Colorado Central Telecom communications tower on Mt. Princeton went down in the Jan. 14 windstorm. Courtesy photo.
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