Repair team helicopters in to fix damaged telecommunications tower
Much of the Crystal River Valley is without broadband and public safety services after an apparent lightning strike over the weekend knocked out a Pitkin County Telecommunications tower on Elephant Mountain.
Thunderstorms on Friday evening that carried into Saturday morning — or a power surge — likely contributed to the outage at the Elephant Mountain Tower outside of Redstone that provides television, FM radio, and broadband services to the Crystal River Valley, said Telecommunications Manager Jeff Krueger. His team of six at Pitkin Telecoms was able to restore TV and FM services over the weekend, but broadband and public safety services will not be restored until Tuesday.
The Elephant Mountain Tower is only accessible by helicopter, hindering the department’s ability to immediately access the site. Krueger and his team accessed the tower Sunday and were able to determine what caused the outage.
“We scrambled on Saturday to try to find a helicopter to get us up there,” he said. “We went up there Sunday and clearly there was some kind of power surge or something that happened … We isolated the cause down to an inverter, and we didn’t have the parts with us.”
Pitkin Telecoms plans to repair the tower Tuesday to restore broadband communication for its customers serviced by the Elephant Mountain tower. The repairs will cost less than $1,000, Krueger said.
Pitkin Telecoms has 12 towers that provide TV, FM, broadband, and public safety services to the county. It works with Pitkin County Regional Emergency Dispatch Center, local law enforcements, fire and emergency medical services, search and rescue services, and other emergency management agencies in Aspen, Basalt, Snowmass Village, and Pitkin County to ensure dispatch can make calls for service and units in the field can communicate with dispatch and each other.
Outages caused by lightning strikes to the towers are rare, Krueger said.
“It’s kind of rare, but it does happen because these sites sit on mountaintops,” he said.
There are 5,350 lightning flashes on any given day in July in Colorado, according to the National Weather Service. Pitkin County sees an average of 3,300 “cloud to ground” lightning strikes per year.