Blog: Dermot Cole
Historic TV tower cut down, while Google Maps car checks out Fairbanks
Published Monday, July 20, 2009
While a crew from the Nolan Brothers company continued to take apart the old TV tower on the roof of the Northward Building, a Google Maps camera car toured the city streets for views of Fairbanks today.
With two men on the tower at a time, the dismantling of the old KTVF equipment that stood above everything else on the valley floor, is a painstaking process.
They are joined at that level today by the hundreds of pigeons that live atop the Polaris Building and make regular sorties to the Northward.
The two workmen, tethered high above the building, worked on opposite sides of the tower for hours, handing a Sawzall, drills and other cutting equipment back and forth as they cut the steel a bit at a time.
They were cutting with great care, to prevent having a long length of pipe tumbling to the roof below.
Dave Castor, director of engineering for KTVF, said they began cutting up the tower for scrap on Saturday and expect to continue all day today.
The Nolan Brothers Antenna Service is based in Soldotna and does tower work across the state. The men on the tower are using drills and saws to cut the three-eighths-inch steel into sections about five feet long.
Then the pieces are lowered to the roof by ropes. KTVF is removing the antenna because it has moved its digital operation to Ester Dome. The station had been paying rent at the Northward Building for decades.
It's possible that the tower has been on the building since TV came to Fairbanks in 1955, but I'm not certain.
Meanwhile, I noticed a camera car from Google Maps touring the streets of Fairbanks this morning. The car, which has Ontario plates, has an elaborate piece of recording equipment on its roof.
The cameras allow 360-degree panoramic photos to be taken.
The photos taken from the car will end up adding to the number of Fairbanks images available on the Google map site.
The dismantling of the tower has nothing to do with the Google Maps camera car, but both represent changes in technology on this 40th anniversary of the first moon walk.
Its interesting that google is re-touring fairbanks. Fairbanks and juneau are the smallest towns that google has mapped out for streetview.
@Thomas: Yeah, that is interesting. I do know there was one section of street where it had a plastic bag over its cameras, and they might be re-filming there, but it'd be nice if they could get footage down the highways and in the other highway connected towns in Alaska, at least.
i would love to drive the alcan on google earth street view. :)
How are they going to get rid of the drunks in these pictures of downtown?
Thomas, don't know where you got the idea that Fairbanks and Juneau are among the smallest towns mapped; there are smaller towns in the lower 48 and in other countries that have been mapped with streetview.
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