WATCH: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/cell-tower-deaths/
Neelsville Middle School
Forest Oak Middle School
Gaithersburg High School
Cell tower compounds have already been installed on playgrounds/fields at the following Montgomery County Public Schools:
Northwood HS - Silver Spring
Blake HS - Silver Spring
Einstein HS - Silver Spring
Kennedy HS - Silver Spring
Wheaton HS - Silver Spring
Springbrook HS - Silver Spring
Blair HS - Silver Spring
Watkins Mill HS - Gaithersburg
Daly Elementary School - Germantown*
Magruder HS - Rockville
Tilden Middle School - Rockville
Sherwood HS - Sandy Spring
Woodwards Road ES site - Gaithersburg
*The Daly ES PTA and community said no to this cell tower and Superintendent Jerry Weast signed the lease and placed the tower on the playground anyway.
Wow -- this is a documentary that says that 100 maintenance workers nationwide died from falls from cell towers in a 10 year period. The investigation also blames half of those deaths on workers -- in violation of all safety regulations -- free climbing (climbing without connecting their safety harnesses). I'm going to start ducking whenever I near a cell tower. In fact, I think you should campaign to remove every cell tower in the county -- why is the risk of non-students being hit by falling maintenance workers less important to you? We can't stand for any of it!
ReplyDeleteSteve Augustino
Mr. Augustino,
DeleteAre you making light of the deaths of these workers?
The point of this documentary, in case you missed it, is the rush to put up cell towers across the country. In that rush, untrained or quickly trained workers are being hired by SUBcontractors. The Frontline piece revealed that cell tower workers are often subcontractors of subcontractors. That is who will be on public school grounds. Will any of these workers be screened for security purposes? Will they be signing in at the front office when they are on school grounds during the school day?
From other MCPS cell tower locations we already know that the workers show up during the school day, work on the tower while children are on the playground, and fail to sign in at the front desk.
Cell towers are commercial structures on school playgrounds and as such introduce a whole new group of adults to being able to interact with public school children. Will these workers be screened? Will their time on school grounds be monitored?
I apologize. When I read this post this morning, I took a much more literal reading of the headline to this post. Now that you've clarified that you cited to the documentary only for the proposition that MCPS can do a better job supervising subcontractors on its property, I agree. They should. Any other generalization from the small sample of the hundreds of thousands of cell towers in the country would be suspect.
DeleteSA
Where will your kid be playing on the playground, preparing for a field sport competition, or practicing for marching band when a wrench is next dropped from a school cell tower? Early in the Frontline piece is,"one persone drops a wrench and it 'll kill somebody." Then Frontline goes on to demonstrate that the tower climbers are hired by sub and sub-sub contractors, but that neither the subs or the carriers themselves adequqtely screen, monitor, and supervise the tower climbers. It's the carriers and their subs who should be in better control of the workers. Frontline shows the climbers to be poorly trained, pressed to climb in unsafe circumstances and conditions, and sometimes working under the influence of substances.
Delete