Broadcast towers are landmarks on the horizon, symbols of permanence and dependability.

Until they fall.

In the last few months, acts of God, and acts of man, have brought several transmission towers crashing down, causing signal disruptions, lost revenue, injury and loss of life.

Don Dunlap, president of South Texas Broadcasting and general manager of KEDT, a Corpus Christi PBS station, suffered weeks of sleepless nights after a Navy MH-53 Sea Dragon anti-mine helicopter, on a training mission from a nearby Naval Air base, collided with the tip of his station's 1,000-foot tower on a foggy Wednesday evening (Jan. 16).

“It's been a nightmare in every sense of the word,” Dunlap says. “We were up in the studio taping a quiz show game for high school students when the transmitter went off. We thought maybe a mouse had got into the works. Then it went on, and off again for good.”

Dunlap raced out to his tower and found the top of it knocked down, his transmission building in flames, and the site filled with burning wreckage. He would later learn that the crash had killed three Navy crewmen and seriously injured a fourth. “All of us were devastated when we heard the Navy crew had died.”

A month earlier, on Dec. 16, 2007, an unprecedented accumulation of ice during a severe winter storm toppled the 823-foot tower of Local TV's ABC affiliate in Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, Pa., WNEP.

Falling guy wires pulled down a second tower belonging to noncommercial WVIA, taking it and its companion FM off the air, too. And Nexstar's WBRE and New Age Media's WYOU suffered temporary power outages when the falling WNEP tower slashed electric lines.

Human error may have caused the collapse of  KATV's 2,000-foot tall tower on the afternoon of Friday, Jan. 11. Hailed as the second tallest man-made structure in the world when it was completed in 1965, the tower crumpled while workers were adjusting guy-wires.

Both KATV, an ABC affiliate belonging to Allbritton Communications, and PBS station KETS lost their signals and one worker at the site was slightly injured.

On March 18, in La Mirada, Calif., a portion of a 684-foot tower being built for Clear Channel's KFI-AM came crashing down due to construction errors, injuring one worker but causing no signal disruption because KFI was using another transmission tower. The new tower, protested by users of nearby Fullerton Airport, is to replace a 760-foot tall tower that fell when a small airplane crashed into it in December of 2004.

Vandalism is also a factor. On March 17, persons unknown cut support wires of a 200- foot tall radio tower in Virginia Beach, bringing the broadcast day of WVAB-AM and WBVA-AM to a premature end.

It may seem as if the sky is falling, but it's not, says David Saul, who insures some 10,000 transmission towers on the North American continent through Atlantic Risk Management of Columbia, Md.

“If you take into account the total number of towers in the U.S., which is something around a quarter million, the claims versus the number of towers have been pretty small from the very beginning, compared to claims per 250,000 buildings or 250,000 automobiles,” he says.

“Tower collapses of any kind are simply very rare. The overwhelming majority of towers built are still standing and performing better than expected.”

As an example, he cites Hurricane Katrina. “We had towers insured in the New Orleans area and all survived. Some were underwater for a while, so they were sandblasted and repainted. But none of them fell.”

Exactly how much a tower failure can cost varies with the situation, he says. Including lost revenue, property damage and tower replacement, losses average about $1.5 million and can run as high as $10 million. [Editor's note: In the original posting of this story, it wrongly reported that losses rarely exceed $1.5 million.]

Knowing that the odds of a tower falling are long provides little solace to those having to deal with it.

In Corpus Christi, KEDT would be without a signal for 14 hours, and when it returned to air it was with severely reduced broadcast range. The companion FM station was able to remain on the air because its antenna was mounted further down the tower and had escaped the collision.

“The experience taught me the value of an up-to-date Rolodex,” Dunlap says. “There really isn't any way you can prepare for this, but if you can get to the right people as fast as possible, you can keep ahead of the game. There are all kinds of people I had to call, from our insurers to the inspectors to the FAA, because the crash knocked out their beacon.”

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