The air is salty in Bonaire, and everything corrodes. The antennas have to be painted once or twice every year. This involves sending the painters up to scrape the loose, scaly rust off, prime it once, prime it a second time, and then paint the final coat at least 24 hours later. This means that each colored section takes about a full week to paint. And there are 7 sections per tower. And 4 towers. That’s a lot of scraping and painting, and a lot of hauling guys up and down.

The rope is actually a relatively new thing. It used to be that the only way was to climb up and down the tower….475 feet…about 40 stories. The previous set of towers were 500 kilowatts, and any rope would have fried overnight if left on the towers. The new towers are 100 kW, and so they tried stringing up ropes, and they survived.

Back when there were more employees here, there was a whole team of people who did nothing but maintain the towers. I believe Lee Lowell, one of our missionaries First Baptist Church supports and who grew up on Bonaire, was one of these antenna riggers.