A great day to climb the water tower ~ May 6, 1999

David Heiller

I knew that if I asked, the water tower crew would say yes, and that would mean I would actually have to follow through on my request and climb the darn thing.

It’s a love-hate relationship, me and heights. I’m not acrophobic, but I do get nervous when I’m high. (No wisecracks, please.)

At first I wanted to climb the old Askov tower, and get a shot of the guys working on the new tower. A bird’s eye view.

I asked the foreman, Jerry Burgess, what he thought.

He told me in a thick southern accent that he wouldn’t climb the old tower, no way. I thought he was joking, or testing me in some way. These guys aren’t acrophobic. But he was serious,

This picture of the Askov water tower
is courtesy of Keith J. Semmelink. 
Thank you, Mr. Semmelink!

It’s old, he explained. Some of the rungs on the ladder could be rusted. But I was welcome to climb the new tower, he said. He would even clip my camera bag on a rope and bring it up for me.

Great, I said. So on Wednesday morning, April 28, Jerry gave me a hard hat and took my camera, and I headed up the new tower. The ladder is inside a cage, so it would be hard for a person to fall and get hurt. You’d have to faint, or have a heart attack. But that was a possible scenario with me.

Two men were suspended about 50 feet off the ground in harnesses. They were welding the legs together. Welding is a key skill in the tower erection business. That and a southern accent. All the guys I talked to had drawls.

I stopped to watch them weld the legs of the tower. A man above would lower hand grinders and welding rods to them. I wished I hadn’t given up my camera.

Some big chunks of steel whistled past me from above. Two men were welding the inside of the tank. When they had a piece of scrap steel, they would drop it. I could see why a hard hat was a necessity.

I kept climbing, but I stopped every 10 seconds or so, partly to calm my nerves, but mostly to admire the view. It was fantastic.

When I reached the base of the tower, the two men were sitting on a scaffolding there. They had finished welding the inside, and were cleaning things up.

They didn’t have harnesses on. They said they were supposed to, but it made work awkward, so they didn’t always use them. One of the guys, John Stenger, said I was welcome to join them. I could swing out, reach over, and he’d give me a hand. I declined. Then he said he was only joking anyway. I should have called his bluff! Yeah, right.

I reached the cat walk. A sturdy railing surrounded it. I could relax there. The base was covered with ropes and hoses and tools. A guy named Don Burgess was straightening equipment; getting ready to leave. They were heading out that day to another job.

I asked Don if he liked his job. He said he did. He liked to weld, he said in his Indiana accent, which was a good southern one. He said he could weld as well with his left hand as he could with his right. Which is quite a gift, if you know anything about welding.

The other two men came up from their scaffolding to help Don with clean up. I asked Jo r, about his job. He had been doing it for about 30 years, and he looked to be my age, on the downhill side of 40. He did take about seven years off to be with his family in Poplar Bluff Missouri. The pay is good, he said, but it’s hard to be away from the wife and kids. Yes, he had a southern accent.

I asked the other guy what his name was. He would only say Greg. He had a warrant out for his arrest in Louisiana, because he hadn’t shown up for a divorce hearing with his ex-wife.

I asked Greg if he was ever got nervous being` up so high. “All the tahm,” he replied, and I could tell he was serious.

I asked if he had ever fallen. No, he said. But he had watched his dad fall 140 feet to his death several years ago. His dad had been climbing to the very top of the tower, on a ladder that didn’t have a cage around it, and a cyst on his pancreas had burst. It caused him to lose his grip and fall. The fall killed him, not the cyst; Greg said. It was a sobering story. Their company, Phoenix Manufacturing, had taken care of his mother all right, he said.

John asked me if I wanted to climb to the very top. The view was even better there. I said no. Greg’s story was fresh in my mind.

The view was superb from where I stood anyway. It was a gorgeous spring morning, the sunlight soft and warm, the air as fresh as flowers. It was a good day to work on a tower, or to. take pictures for a newspaper, even for a guy who is a little afraid of heights.