A little Richmond humor. This is actually the 800 foot tower for local television station WTVR. It is also the transmitter for NPR member radio station WCVE-FM. Is your immediate response when seeing it for the first time, "I'll bet I could climb that!"? Read this column from
http://tobaccoave.wordpress.com/ which might change your mind:
"University of Richmond student Brian Walters told friends last night that he is “almost certain” that he could safely scale and descend the 800-foot transmission tower operated by CBS 6.
In reality, however, the 21-year-old would be killed in an extremely painful fashion atop the iconic West Broad Street television transmission antenna.
“I drive by that thing every day on the way home. Climbing it would be so easy – I saw this ladder on it, and I could use some rope as a harness,” Walters told friends of the red-and-white tower with three broadcast dishes that, when in use, would push nearly 10,000 volts of electricity through his 167-pound body at ultrahigh frequencies, vaporizing the business major in less than one-tenth of a second.
“It’s simple, really,” he said.
Transmission tower manager Frank Maddock said Walters could likely successfully climb nearly 70 percent of the way up the structure.
However, he said the young man would inevitably fail to make it to the 71 percent mark, either losing his grip or footing or accidentally looking down before plummeting to the ground. “But not before becoming entangled around several of the the 16-gauge galvanized ‘X’ braces and the tower’s heat-treated aluminum alloy rivets,” Maddock added, noting Walters would probably be split into approximately 40 pieces.
“I’m pretty sure the hardest part would be getting over the barbed wire that surrounds the thing,” Walters said, unaware that if he could make it over the twisted, razor-sharp fencing he still would have to face a 300 gigahertz microwave produced by the oil-cooled multistage depressed collector installed at the tower’s 650th foot, creating an electron beam that would cause his bones to melt and organs to burst into a cloud of red fluid that would glow in the night sky.
“I’ve just got to be careful of those barbs,” Walters said. “They could really get me.”
As the tallest freestanding structure in the city limits, the spire can be seen for miles, helping the news station reach viewers throughout Central Virginia in a radius that spans from Fredericksburg to Charlottesville, east to Hampton Roads and into North Carolina.
That distance is also approximately how far Walters’ screams of absolute terror would resonate throughout the troposphere, picked up by televisions across the state, Maddock said."
