Thursday, October 20, 2016

Bethesda TV tower lights up after 6-week blackout

An 850' Crown Castle telecommunications tower in the 5200 block of River Road has operated for 6 weeks with no aircraft warning lights. The lights failed on Friday, September 9. White flashers installed on the tower in recent years had malfunctioned repeatedly, and went off entirely on three occasions in the last 22 months. Last night, the tower suddenly had warning lights again, this time the classic red flashers that are more appropriate for a residential area.

The unprecedented length of the outage suggests Crown Castle does not have adequate monitoring systems for failure of its warning lights, which is what I have suspected for several years now. With the company seeking to add small cell towers to utility poles and other mounts in residential areas, this should raise questions about their maintenance, monitoring and FCC compliance procedures.

On a positive note, I hope the red flashers are here to stay. A few weeks ago, a second Crown Castle tower on the grounds of the Kenwood Country Club reverted back to red lighting, as well.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

8:28 Yet you're here everyday, reading every post, and commenting.

And the same could be said of you: "why don't you actually do something about it rather than bitch about on this (as you call it) bullshit blog?"

Anonymous said...

9:05 - How do you know that 8:28 is "here every day" and "reads every post"?

Robert Dyer said...

8:28: I'm the guy who's gotten the lights turned back on, or their intensity reduced, as the case may be. I actually do something on a regular basis. I've gotten more done in Bethesda than our impotent Council, and they make 6-figures. What are we paying those clowns for at this point?

Robert Dyer said...

Yep, a BS blog so irrelevant, the MoCo cartel adds trolling it 24/7 to your list of Guy Friday duties they pay you for.