True Price of an Apple iPhone

What price technology and share price success? Six men have died in 5 weeks after falling from cell phone towers and masts in the USA after a successful period of no fatalities between December and April.

Just as we’re happy to don clothes made by poorly paid workers in the Far East and South America, the sacrifice these men have made to allow us to carry on using our latest gadgets, just so their families get fed, is a terrible price to pay for the way we live.

From Wireless Estimator:

• April 12: A 34-year-old cell tower technician from Oklahoma man died after falling 150 feet from monopole antenna in Wake Forest, NC. It was the nation’s first death in 2008 of a communications worker falling from an elevated structure.
• April 14: A tower worker employed by Cornerstone Tower of Grand Island, Neb., fell to his death in Moorcroft, WY.
• April 15: A 38-year-old technician finished tightening the bolts on a guyed wireless tower in San Antonio, TX, “sort of lean[ed] back a little,” according to witnesses, and fell 225 feet to his death.
• April 17: North Carolina suffered its second cell tower fatality in a week when a 46-year-old Chesapeake, VA, man fell from a communications antenna in Frisco, NC.
• April 23: A Griffin, GA, man died from extensive head and chest injuries after falling 100 feet from a communications tower near Natchez, MS. He was reportedly hanging boom gates to a Cell South antenna when he fell.
• May 16: Guilford was rappelling down a load line attached to a 200 foot monopole when he stopped abruptly 140 feet up and bounced as if on a bungee cord, disengaging the carabiner that was secured to the tower

We need to deal with with this, not sweep it under the carpet.

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