By Kim Krisberg

Wally Reardon stopped climbing towers for a living back in 2002 due to an injury. He had spent years putting up communication antennas anywhere employers wanted them — smokestacks, buildings, grain silos, water tanks. Just about anything that rose up into the sky, Reardon would find a way to scale it. It was exhilarating.

“I can’t explain that freedom that we felt,” Reardon told me. “I just liked the adventure of climbing towers. I just totally loved it. It was a crazy lifestyle and we were like a bunch of nomads. We lived by our own rules.”

It was also dangerous. In fact, Reardon and his fellow tower climbers made their living doing one of the most dangerous jobs in the country. Since 2003, about 100 climbers have lost their lives scaling communication towers. Half of those workers died working on cellular service sites, according to a ProPublica and PBS Frontline broadcast that aired last week. The two news organizations calculate that between 2003 and 2010, the tower industry had an average fatality rate of 123.6 per 100,000 workers — more than 10 times greater than the fatality rate in the construction industry.

“I had a lot of injuries over the years, but never sought medical help for them because it meant I’d be taken out of the field, so I went back to work hurt,” Reardon remembers. “I was kind of naive. I had this feeling that if something happened to me, my family would be taken care of — that if they put me in a situation that got me killed, there’d be some sort of justice. A lot of my co-workers talked about these things. Sometimes we’d do jobs and think ‘how did we just survive that?’”

Today, Reardon is an outspoken advocate for tower climbers’ safety and co-founder of the Workers at Heights Safety and Health Initiative, which is housed at the Occupational Health Clinical Centers (OHCC) in Syracuse, N.Y. Among its efforts to elevate and enforce worker safety standards, the initiative is working to make sure climbers’ voices are included in industry conversations about safety.

“Despite a lot of verbiage from contractors and (cell phone) carriers that safety is No. 1, in reality there are certainly gaps in practices and tremendous pressures on workers to get these jobs done and get them done at a pace that forces workers to make shortcuts,” said Patricia Rector, director of outreach and education at OHCC and advisor to the Workers at Heights Initiative. “Their lives are literally hanging in the balance.”

Where’s OSHA?

Cell phones are everywhere. They’re so ubiquitous that we can hardly imagine getting along without them anymore. For the cell phone carriers, it’s a fierce race to see who can offer the most coverage at the lowest price. It means expanding their cellular networks as fast as possible. And that’s a lot of pressure for tower climbers, who are so far down the chain of command that they have little, if any, chance to voice safety concerns.

Climbers’ scale towers that are hundreds, or even thousands, of feet off the ground, making repairs, affixing antennas and doing routine maintenance. Many are also involved in the work of erecting towers. Climbers travel often and long distances, going where the growing network takes them. To stay safe, Occupational Safety and Health Administration rules dictate that workers be tied to the structures they’re climbing 100 percent of the time, but Reardon routinely documents workers “free-climbing,” or going without required safety equipment.

Reardon said that when he was climbing  he often found it “next to impossible” to be in compliance and meet employers’ quick turnaround expectations. When free-climbing, Reardon said it took about two days or so to get a job done; when staying tied to the structure and wearing heavy safety equipment, the same job could take five to seven days. It’s a dangerous climbing technique that Reardon said he still sees happening.

“The (employer) says ‘you’ll be done at the end of the day, right?’ So what do you tell them,” Reardon asked. “You start pushing and pushing and everybody’s free-climbing. It’s proliferating the problem of guys falling.”

Adding to the problem is that holding anyone accountable for safety gaps that result in death and injury is a bit of a shell game. One source interviewed on the ProPublica/Frontline broadcast likened it to whack-a-mole: OSHA can go after one subcontractor for breaking safety rules and another one just pops up in its place. And the major cell phone carriers — the ones at the top of the hiring pyramid — avoid nearly all scrutiny. With so many layers of subcontracting between the carrier and the tower climber, companies like AT&T aren’t even officially tied to the deaths. According to ProPublica/Frontline, looking up the major cell phone carriers in OSHA’s database of workplace accident investigations won’t yield one tower worker death.

Ryan Knutson and Liz Day describe other findings from the ProPublica/PBS investigation into climbers’ deaths:

We found that in accident after accident, deadly missteps often resulted because climbers were shoddily equipped or received little training before being sent up hundreds of feet. To satisfy demands from carriers or large contractors, tower hands sometimes worked overnight or in dangerous conditions.

One carrier, AT&T, had more fatalities on its jobs than its three closest competitors combined, our reporting revealed. Fifteen climbers died on jobs for AT&T since 2003. Over the same period, five climbers died on T-Mobile jobs, two died on Verizon jobs and one died on a job for Sprint.

The death toll peaked between 2006 and 2008, as AT&T merged its network with Cingular’s and scrambled to handle traffic generated by the iPhone. Eleven climbers died on AT&T jobs in those three years.

According to Rector, the buffer between carrier and climber has to change.

“There needs to be mechanisms of accountability for the carriers at the top of the food chain,” Rector told me. “It’s an old story — the shell game that’s played on workers through subcontracting that prevents holding accountable those that should be held most accountable. So long as carriers can treat the loss of human life as a cost of doing business then workers will continue to pay the price with their lives.”

Calling for change

Enforcing worker safety rules already on the books would be a good start, Reardon said, adding that if “climbers are being slowed down that much by being in compliance, then someone needs to think of a better way to do the job.” But better enforcement is only the beginning.

“I think it’s too easy to say that all we need is more regulations and more inspectors, although we probably do,” Rector said. “Workers needs to be included in conversations about safety in this industry, included as active participants and really be respected as stakeholders. We think things could be so much safer if workers were more seriously integrated into the safety conversation…because the smallest misstep taken at 200 feet has catastrophic consequences.”

Right now, there seems to be no level playing field when it comes to safety or accountability — there’s so much competition to keep costs low and win the subcontracting bid that corners are being cut, said Dale Remington, a former climber who’s now retired. Remington’s son, Dirk, was a climber too. He lost his life on a tower site on Dec. 14, 2009, at 2:45 p.m. in Schuyler County, N.Y., at age 46.

Dirk was about 50 feet from the ground replacing guy-wires — cables that hold the structure upright and stable — when the tower collapsed, pinning Dirk inside it. The tower came down “like an accordion, a house of cards — that’s what killed my son,” Remington told me. Remington said he believes an inexperienced supervisor and the rush to get the job done both contributed to his son’s death.

“OSHA needs to get more involved,” Remington said. “There has to be a fear of losing money or else the people at the top just kind of turn a blind eye. To have an industry that has 10 times the deaths of an associated industry — there’s something really, really wrong here.”

To read the full ProPublica/Frontline investigation, click here. More info on tower climber safety is on the Workers at Heights site.

Kim Krisberg is a freelance public health writer living in Austin, Texas, and has been writing about public health for a decade.

The minute I announced my pregnancy with Simon, the first question most people asked me was “Oh, are you trying for a girl?”  I admit, the question annoyed me.  The implication seemed to be that everyone dreams of the perfect matched set, one boy and one girl.  In fact, I always had a strong intuition from the first moment that my babies were boys (Isaiah was the only time I wasn’t totally sure), and I was never at all unhappy about that.  I also objected to the implied impugning of my math skills – if I didn’t want a CHILD, I certainly wouldn’t bet on a 50-50 shot .

As my house filled up with boys, the assumption was that we were STILL shooting for a girl – and then when we stopped having children people sympathetically said “Oh, you gave up.”  Once when carrying around a friend’s daughter, I was stopped by dozens of people who said “Oh, did you finally get your girl?”  To this, Eric coined the word “abdoption” for the process of stealing your friends’ kids.  I know people mean well, and it doesn’t really bother me, but I do find it odd that everyone assumes I am suffering for lack of a daughter.  When we started fostering, of course, everyone pretty much assumed we wanted girls.

I admit, I love little boys.  Now let me be clear, I wouldn’t be unhappy if our next pacement involved a girl or two, if only because it has the charm of novelty, and, after all, I am now storing a buttload of girl clothes, so they might as well get used,  but I am loving this batch of boys we’ve got right now.  As it stands, it looks as though C. and K. are going to be with us a few more weeks, and will go to family in late June.  We’ll miss them like crazy, of course, but we’re concentrating on having a really good time, and part of the sheer pleasure to me is watching six little boys form a giant gang (incorporating any extra kids who happen to be visiting, of course) spreading dirt, happiness and mayhem as they go.

Both Asher and C. (6 and 7  respectively) could have been the original models for Tom Sawyer  or any of the other classic benign trouble-making boys of history and literature.  Filled with boundless energy, they’ve never seen a frog they didn’t want to catch, never seen a fence they didn’t want to climb, never seen a tree branch that didn’t make them want to hang upside down, a mud puddle they didn’t want to splash in.  They are constantly mystified at my perversity in constantly saying  ”Put the vole back outside right now!” and “No, that doesn’t go in your hair!”  Yes, I know little girls do these things to – in fact, I was that kind of little girl, but these guys are almost cartoons of high energy boydom.

They are also incredibly hard working, kind and loving kids.  C. spent yesterday helping out for the entire morning – he helped Eric with the milking, carried water buckets, fed the rabbits, helped me plant containers, hauled compost and put laundry away.  Asher regularly proves that a 58lb child can carry a 50lb feed sack, and constantly offers to assist.  They are children who probably aren’t well suited to a life of sitting quietly, but who are at their best when there’s lots to be done.  They burst with pride when they work, and won’t stop until the job is done.  Both have incredible generous streaks, and because pesky but benign adults are always telling them “No, stop, that’s dangerous, don’t do that…” very tolerant relationships to us weirdo adults who don’t understand that painting with spaghetti sauce on the couch is awesome.

K. and Isaiah, both eight, are made in a quieter mold.  Both of them derive a lot of pleasure from silly humor and adult approval.  They’ve formed a major bond, sharing a love of various card trading games, cooking and reading.  They also enjoy building things with legos and trying to dam up the creek (the fact that they never actually succeed for any length of time in no way affects their pleasure in doing it.)  Both are sensitive and gentle souls who are extraordinarily kind and generous to other people – Isaiah is always the one who volunteers to skip something if there aren’t enough to go around “That’s ok, I don’t need a popsicle, he can have mine.”  K. is one of the most loving and sweet-natured kids I’ve ever run into, always willing to help, unfailingly gentle and kind with my disabled eldest (actually both C. and K. are amazing with him) and a complete cuddle bug.  Isaiah travels with a stuffed animal at all times from his large collection of unusual stuffed creatures (he has an okapi, a dodo, a wombat, a kakapo, two echidnas (long and short nosed, of course), a pygmy marmoset, etc…), K. always has his collection of trading cards with him and is ever ready to attribute to you +2 powers.

Simon at 10 1/2 is nearly a preteen, and relishes his role as the functional eldest (due to Eli’s autism, that’s Simon’s role).  He likes to boss other kids around, but mostly does so kindly, and is terribly protective of the other kids.  By choice gets up at 5:45 every morning to walk C. and K. to the bus, and takes seriously his responsibility for them.  I sometimes have to remind him “Hey, the Mom is right here, you don’t have to be the Mom” and he tells me with a grin “Sometimes it is hard not to be the Mom.”  He will be an amazing parent someday – he especially loves babies and toddlers and is just wonderful with them, but is also great with older children.  He does need his time alone, and spends a lot of time enjoying the privileges of 10-ness – he’s allowed to roam further than any of the other kids – but more often than not invites the other boys to go along.  He spends as much time as he can making up stories, cartooning and writing – often while sitting in a tree.

Eli is 12, and because of his disabilities, still doesn’t talk much, so it is hard to know what’s he’s thinking, but he is so full of joy and energy that we know he’s happy most of the time.  He spends his days on the swing, playing the creek, swimming (he’s very athletic), and dribbling balls around the house.  Affectionate and giggly with a merry sense of humor, he is likely to sneak up behind you and tickle you, and he constantly gets into things – but the messes he makes aren’t that important and he so clearly enjoys being one of the guys that it is just a pleasure to watch.  He’s a devoted big brother and loving foster brother, who never resents being kindly bossed around by the other kids – indeed, he revels in the attention.

The aggregate boydom is loud, messy, bickers a fair bit, and occasionally descends into whacking each other with things.  In an odd way, that’s actually part of their joy.  While I’m stereotyping a little bit, I remember so well from my own girlhood the complex ways little girls often played out their conflicts “You aren’t my best friend anymore, only my third best friend…” and other kinds of junior “mean girls” stuff that could go on for weeks.  It isn’t that my kids don’t say mean things, and it isn’t that whacking each other with plastic swords is better, but there’s something straightforward about it all, and for the most part, conflicts are forgotten within minutes.  I feel better equipped to handle the direct stuff, somehow.  All six of my sons are bright, bright kids with a lot going for them.

Why am I singing the praises of little boys?  Well, in part because we have a culture that seems to generally prefer girls, at least in some respects.  While a Gallup poll found that if parents were intending to give birth to only one child, they’d rather have a son than a daughter, for adoption, US Census data shows that girls are significantly preferred by almost all parents.  African-American and biracial boys of partial African-American descent (C. and K. are biracial)  are the least desirable children in the foster care and adoption world  .  Statistically speaking, for every 100 girls that gets adopted, only 85-89 (depending on age group, the numbers are actually worse for younger kids) little boys ever get adopted.

The reality of this means that a lot of little boys end up languishing in foster care (there are more boys total in care, and slightly more boys in the general population), and aging out of the system.  The outcomes for kids who aren’t adopted are appalling:

One in four will be incarcerated within two years of leaving foster care, 1 in 5 will become homeless, only half will graduate from high school, and less than 3 percent receive college degrees.

Most of us probably haven’t thought much about what it is like to be kicked out of care at 18 with nowhere to go, no one to live with, no support system, no consistency.  Aged out foster kids talk about what it is like never to receive a birthday card, to have no one to celebrate milestones with.  I once read an interview with a young man who noted that having made a comparative success of himself, everyone assumed that he was ok with never having been adopted – but that as he enters into adulthood, he longed for adoption even more – because the need for a family never stops, the desire to have someone be excited that you exist never stops.

Why don’t people want boys?  There are a lot of speculative answers, from the idea that because mothers mostly take the lead on adoption, they are more likely to want children like themselves to the higher rates of disability and school issues with male children. The reason that people prefer to give birth to boys but to adopt girls may be related to historical ways that girls are perceived as being better able to join other families (since that was so often their role in marriage).

My own thinking (mostly based on the anecdotal, however) tends to focus around the latter two explanations, and also around the cultural perception that boys are more likely to be “bad” or that boy issues are harder to manage.   I see this over and over – people who are impressed that I can manage four or more little boys, but who seem to think that girls are a walk in the park.  Having been part of a group of three sisters, I tend to think that both of them have their challenges.

Seven and eight year old non-white boys like the ones I have are, in many places, by definition already defined as “hard to adopt.”  Now these little guys don’t need adoption – they have family that loves and wants them and most likely will settle there – and they landed in a home where if need be, we would have happily kept them forever.  It would be so easy, however, for them to be one of the tens of thousands of little boys who bounce around the system without a home, however.

I wish I could go out there and show off these wonderful, bright, loving, kind, generous, funny, sweet natured boys to everyone who has ever considered adopting a child and point out that what we’re doing isn’t always hard, it is mostly FUN. That doesn’t mean there are no behavioral problems, no challenges, no troubles – life isn’t perfect.    Lord knows, my parents had plenty with my sisters and me, though.  Children in foster care have lost a lot, and all of them have issues – but that doesn’t mean that boys are so challenging that it isn’t worth considering them if you want to adopt.

Adoption and fostering is a private decision, and there are lots of wholly legitimate reasons why one might prefer little girls – you always dreamed of a daughter, they would have to share a bedroom with your extant daughter, you are called to a particular child, you have a teenage daughter and don’t think teen boys would be a good mix…  A lot of the time who you adopt is simply a matter of what children end up in your home first.  I’m not sitting in judgement of anyone’s choices. But since May is foster care awareness month, I do feel like giving others a picture of the joy of boys might be something I could do, in the hopes that maybe someone who thinks that boys are too hard, too likely to bring trouble might rethink and consider a boy.

When someone asks me if my boys are trouble, I think always of Leonato’s gentle reply to Don Pedro’s statement that by coming to his home, he is giving Leonato much trouble:

“Never came trouble to my house in the face of Your Grace, for trouble being gone, comfort should remain; but when you depart from me, sorrow abides and happiness takes his leave.”

The only real trouble my boys – these or any others we’ve had under our roof (we’ve had quite a few over the past year, along with 6 girls) – give me is when we have to say goodbye and happiness takes his leave.