Feb
22
Written by:
2/22/2011 6:04 AM
Charles S. ‘Buc’ Fitch is a frequent contributor. I saw Brett Moss’
post about bullet holes.
It’s no joke. About 20 years back I went out to inspect a decommissioned TV tower for a potential FM antenna support structure. As I walked up to the site I was intrigued by the “mottled” appearance of the cinder block of one of the buildings at the tower base.
We’re all looking for interesting variance in building products to add something in the way of style to these otherwise mundane structures so I took a careful look at the surface. A moment of confusion and then I realized that it was bullet impacts.
The chiseling from the fusillade that had riddled the wall was fairly evenly distributed, so I counted the holes on one block and then multiplied this times the number of blocks on the about 10-by-10-foot face that I was looking at. IIRC, it was well over 400.
The block was probably the high-strength type because the walls ran up over 8 feet, evidently for some RF ceiling-mounted switch gear that had previously been in the building; so I would think that few went through to the inside. I’m also guessing that since we were close to the Canadian border (cold country) that all hollows were either filled with sand insulation or rebar and concrete.
The site was in a suburban area. Judging by the impacts, methinks it was a competition .22- caliber short-round pistol that must have been using this as a backstop.
Such vandalism and recklessness borders on the criminal — not to mention extremely stupid.
1 comment(s) so far...
It’s a Real Crime
Over the years, I've had my share of bullet holes in transmitter buildings... and towers! Just last year we discovered what appeared to be a .30 Cal. hole in one leg of one of the WDCX(AM) towers in Rochester, NY. The hole went clear through with dimpling on the impact side and some tear-out on the opposite side. We had a tower contractor repair the hole with a patch.
And a couple of years ago, we had a copper thief caught on a security camera shooting out the sodium security light with a handgun... the next frame caught white-hot fragments of the light falling from the socket.
We're building our new AM site in Southern California to be as "bulletproof" as possible, installing CMU (concrete masonry unit) walls tight around tower base areas to protect base insulators, ATUs, etc. and around the transmitter building, being careful to keep the steel door in the CMU wall around the transmitter building from lining up with the door on the building itself.
By Cris Alexander on
2/23/2011 12:32 AM
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