Tall order: The WUFT-TV tower at Devil's Millhopper, constructed in 1981, also holds the WUFT-FM and WRUF-FM antennas. (Photo by David Zentz)
When the tower of babble came tumbling down
By Ralph Lowenstein
In broadcasting jargon, they’re known as sticks – tall transmission towers that deliver stations’ signals. Dozens of guy wires keep their spines upright. Cutting just one of these cables puts the tower in jeopardy. This happens so rarely, you probably cannot remember the last time you read a story about a collapsing tower.
But it happened to the College of Journalism and Communications, in the midst of Homecoming activities on an overcast October Friday morning in 1980. When we got the word that a plane had clipped a WUFT-TV tower guy wire, General Manager David Brugger and I drove to the site at Devil’s Millhopper.
The once-magnificent tower, 869 feet high, was a pile of scrap metal, twisted into grotesque shapes. We saw three badly burned bodies amid the ashes of the still-smoldering plane. Guy wires stretched across the clearing like giant pieces of unattached string. A large satellite-receiving dish looked like an eggshell crushed by a giant. A WUFT engineer, who had been in the nearby transmitter building, stood right outside the building, dazed.
Good luck, bad luck and providence, I have learned, usually accompany and follow an unusual accident like this:
Bad Luck
A chartered twin-motor Beechcraft 18 carried two Tampa attorneys to Lake City. Lake City was fogged in with low-hanging clouds, so the pilot flew 40 miles south to Gainesville seeking better visibility for landing. He found similar conditions and lost power to one of his two engines. His crippled plane, now off course (Gainesville airport had no radar in those days), dipped into the cloud and fog cover, hit a WUFT guy wire and crashed. All three men aboard died instantly. Damages to WUFT-TV: $700,000.
Good Luck
Transmitter towers are built like Erector Set projects, with many pieces and sections held together by thousands of bolts. They are designed to collapse upon themselves, rather than fall outward like a redwood tree sawed at its base. The design worked. The pieces fell on the WUFT site, not on the roofs of nearby homes.
Down and out: The WUFT-TV tower fell during Homecoming 1980 after a small plane hit one of its guy wires.
Bad Luck
Even so, neighbors asked the Alachua County Commission to prevent WUFT from rebuilding another tower on the site. They had located their homes within the shadow of the old tower, which was there 20 years before them, but they did not want a new tower.
Good Luck
A few months earlier, the College received permission from the FAA to build a second tower to serve WUFT-FM, scheduled to go on the air in 1981. Thus, we did not have to “rebuild” the tower. The second tower had been designed to hold the WUFT-TV, WUFT-FM and WRUF-FM antennae, and it was too late for most protests to stop that process. WUFT-TV was completely down for only one day. Our engineers dragged a coaxial cable from the WUFT transmitter building to the Cox Communication building 1,200 yards away. This allowed the station to reach most Gainesville viewers. In one month, we had a 320-foot portable tower up and running. The signal could reach only 35 miles, instead of our usual 75, but at least it was a signal.
Bad Luck
Martin Caidin, author of the bestseller “Cyborg” (basis for the TV series “The Six Million Dollar Man”) and 150 other books, lived in Gainesville. Although Jewish, he wore a Nazi pilot’s cap around town, and owned and flew a 1930s Fokker F-7 Trimotor. (He rented the plane to Hollywood for World War II movies. If you saw Clint Eastwood’s “Where Eagles Dare,” you saw Caidin’s Fokker.) He tried to convince the FAA to block construction, arguing that if a plane taking off to the west from the airport could not climb or turn left or right, it would run into the new tower. “WUFT Meets the Fokker” resulted in extended lawsuits, mounting legal bills and a mountain of correspondence with the FAA.
Providence
Cary “Bubba” Cox was the engineer in the transmitter building on that fatal Homecoming morning. The thousands of pounds of collapsing metal miraculously only clipped the edge of the roof. Bubba considered this a sign from God. A few weeks later, he gave notice to WUFT and looked for a new profession.
Our new 865-foot tower was built in time for WUFT-FM to go on the air in September 1981. We installed the WUFT-TV and the WRUF-FM antennas on it. Whenever I see a tall “stick,” I think of the magnificent engineering of these Erector Set towers, stretching one-sixth of a mile up into the sky and maintained in gravity-defying balance by threads of steel cable.
As for Bubba, the last we heard, he was indeed happy in his new calling as a video recording operator in Orlando.
