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Today I climbed a water tower for the first time. Here is some background info:

1. I hate wasps, yellow-jackets, and hornets. I am somewhat allergic to their stings and I have been stung many times.
2. I am comfortable climbing structures that I know and that I can easily tell are safe. I am very uncomfortable climbing structures that I’ve never been on and might be falling apart.

Now for the story…

This afternoon Ian (my coworker) and I drove up to Battleground, WA to do some on-site research for a customer that is going to be spending about $20,000 with us in the next month. This customer is a private Adventist school, so they have several buildings on their campus. We were there to plan a link between two of those buildings and also to see if we could provide them with a connection to our tower on Sylvan hill.

When we arrived we met up with two of their employees who worked with us to plan the project. We began by climbing up about 30 feet on to one of the building roofs. This was where we are going to locate one end of the building-to-building link. Everything went smoothly with that phase of our planning, so we eventually moved on to the water tower.

When we approached the water tower I immediately became nervous. It was rather old, and was starting to rust. During the initial 40 feet of the climb I was going to be enclosed in what I call the death tube. They had installed a steel casing around the ladder to keep unauthorized climbers off of the tower. Here is what I was about to ascend:

As I started to climb I began to get even more unnerved. I didn’t feel too unsafe yet, but I had little red flags in my brain due to the fact that if something failed I could die. During the climb up the death-tube my feet would slam into the metal with every step, resulting in a resonating boom that caused the old paint to flake off and float to the ground below.
Here is a picture of the death-tube looking down from above:

I was okay with the death-tube booming and the rusty steps (since they felt pretty solid), however when I got to the top of the death tube I reached to open the hatch so I could continue up the ladder when I saw this:

You can see the two wasps nests in the picture. I took this on my way back down after I had gotten the poisonous wasp spray, sprayed all 8 wasps from below (fearing that they would come attack me), had the wasp poison drip on me, washed it off, climbed back up, and finally opened the hatch.

Now that the wasps were dead I continued up the ladder, flinching every time I saw a fly buzz near me. Here is what the crazy ladder looked like going up:

Once I got to the top of the ladder I got off onto the platform and tried to relax a little while I took some pictures. Eventually I figured out that I needed to climb higher…all the way to the tip-top of the water tower. This was a very nerve-wracking task since when I grabbed on to the ladder it would swing from side-to-side with very little effort. I consulted with the people on the ground and they informed me that the swaying was OK and was because the ladder was meant to rotate around the tower for easy access to all sides. I thought about this for awhile and decided that it should be ok. Just in case I told Ian to tell my wife I love her if I died. With very little confidence I started the climb. The ladder was covered in pigeon poop since they sit up there all day long. I eventually got to the top and saw that the ladder was well-attached and I was safe. Finally I was able to relax and so I took this picture:

I eventually made it down safely with no bee stings, and a positive site-survey for their location. That was my afternoon adventure.

(note: If I ever actually felt like I was in danger I would have stopped and gotten off of the tower, but it was still rather unnerving.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 6th, 2006 at 9:18 pm and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.