Delaney, Douglas Scott
WORK TITLE: Tower Dog
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Flint Hills
STATE: KS
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://softskull.com/authors/douglas-scott-delaney/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | n 2017015597 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n2017015597 |
| HEADING: | Delaney, Douglas Scott |
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| 001 | 10404657 |
| 005 | 20170320105440.0 |
| 008 | 170320n| azannaabn |n aaa |
| 010 | __ |a n 2017015597 |
| 040 | __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |
| 100 | 1_ |a Delaney, Douglas Scott |
| 670 | __ |a Tower dog, 2017: |b ECIP t.p. (Douglas Scott Delaney) |
PERSONAL
Born in Brooklyn, NY.
ADDRESS
- Home - Flint Hills, KS.
CAREER
Writer and tower climber. Has worked for film companies, including Columbia Pictures and Fox Searchlight. Has worked as a tower climber, 1991—.
WRITINGS
- Tower Dog: Life Inside the Deadliest Job in America, Soft Skull Press (Berkeley, CA), 2017
Has also written plays and screenplays. Contributor of short stories to publications, including Western Humanities Review, Prism International, and Kansas Quarterly.
SIDELIGHTS
Douglas Scott Delaney is a writer and tower climber for a cellular network. A native of Brooklyn, New York, he is based in Flint Hills, Kansas. Delaney has worked for film companies, including Columbia Pictures and Fox Searchlight. He has written plays and screenplays and has contributed short stories to publications, including Western Humanities Review, Prism International, and Kansas Quarterly. Delaney has been working as a tower climber, or “tower dog,” since 1991.
In 2017, Delaney released his first book, Tower Dog: Life Inside the Deadliest Job in America, in which he discusses the dangers involved in his line of work. He describes his first ascent onto a tower in Kansas. The weather was very cold and felt even colder to Delaney as he climbed the 200 feet to the top of the tower. He recalls initially telling himself that the job would be bearable. However, as his eleven-hour shift passed, he became increasingly less able to deal with it. In addition to discussing his own experiences as a tower dog, Delaney also profiles his coworkers and tells stories of frightening incidents that he has seen or heard about involving tower dogs. A man named Joel Metz was decapitated by a cable on a tower, and his body remained in the air in his harness until coworkers could remove it. Other dangers to tower dogs include electrocution, lightning, wind, and falling debris. Despite the job’s risks, Delaney notes that tower dogs typically make less than twenty dollars per hour.
In an interview with Josh Garner, contributor to the New York Post website, Delaney explained why the job of a tower dog is so important. He stated: “A tower goes down, the cellphone companies start losing thousands of dollars per second and somebody has to fix it. … There’s no waiting for a day when conditions are better and the work will be safer. … The cost of having a clear cell signal is blood and lives.” In the same interview with Garner, Delaney discussed how he and his coworkers feel when they learn of the deaths of other tower dogs. He stated: “When someone gets killed over something that [he] couldn’t control—that is what puts gray hairs on our heads.”
Reviewers offered favorable assessments of Tower Dog. Describing the writing style in the book, a Kirkus Reviews critic asserted: “Delaney is unfussy and workmanlike.” The same critic described Tower Dog as “a vivid book guaranteed to make readers more aware of what it takes to get that cellphone signal into his or her hand, for better or worse.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2017, review of Tower Dog: Life Inside the Deadliest Job in America.
ONLINE
New York Post Online, https://nypost.com/ (April 22, 2017), Josh Garner, author interview and review of Tower Dog.
Soft Skull Press Website, https://softskull.com/ (February 12, 2018), author profile.
- Tower Dog: Life Inside the Deadliest Job in America Soft Skull Press (Berkeley, CA), 2017
- Soft Skull Press - https://softskull.com/authors/douglas-scott-delaney/
DOUGLAS SCOTT DELANEY is an award-winning and produced playwright and screenwriter. He has done development work with Fox Searchlight and Columbia Pictures, among many others, and has done production work for both TV and film. His short fiction has been published in Kansas Quarterly, Prism International and Western Humanities Review. Born in Brooklyn, Delaney now lives in the Kansas Flint Hills, where he has been a tower dog since 1991.
QUOTED: "Delaney is unfussy and workmanlike."
"a vivid book guaranteed to make readers more aware of what it takes to get that cellphone signal into his or her hand, for better or worse."
Delaney, Douglas Scott: TOWER DOG
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 1, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Delaney, Douglas Scott TOWER DOG Soft Skull Press (Adult Nonfiction) $16.95 4, 11 ISBN: 978-1-61902-938-5
A memoir from a young "fourteen-dollar-an-hour cog in a thankless deadly wheel."For some people in this world, their routines involve drinking beer in lawn chairs set up in the parking lots of small-town hotels, then getting up to climb hundreds of feet into the air to construct and maintain the cellphone networks that the rest of us depend on. It's dangerous work--the most dangerous job in the world, by the measure on which this narrative hinges, and one that has already taken the lives of many of the people portrayed here. In 1997, sometime screenwriter and playwright Delaney exchanged the ivory for the steel tower and made his first "tower dog" ascent into the sky over Kansas in freezing weather. "This would not be so bad," he writes, instantly adding, "But for the next 200 feet and the next eleven hours it was very, very bad." His fellow climbers are philosophical, if stoically resigned to the pain, discomfort, and danger of their work. They are also masterful technicians, and if nothing else, readers will learn what 4G means and how cellphone towers work. Throughout, the author plays a few writerly tricks, including protesting his writerly status ("I never called myself a writer. I never introduced myself as a writer and I was always uncomfortable when I was introduced as a writer"), but these are minor annoyances in a readable book whose larger import is in depicting a world that very few people would want to explore firsthand, somewhere between the blue-collar and the high-wire. Delaney is unfussy and workmanlike, and if he never attains the philosophical depth of, say, Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009), he delivers a persuasive, whole-sighted view of a highly specialized pursuit. A vivid book guaranteed to make readers more aware of what it takes to get that cellphone signal into his or her hand, for better or worse.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Delaney, Douglas Scott: TOWER DOG." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A482911685/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=6a541b86. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
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- New York Post
https://nypost.com/2017/04/22/keeping-up-your-cellphone-service-has-killed-35-people/
Word count: 819QUOTED: "A tower goes down, the cellphone companies start losing thousands of dollars per second and somebody has to fix it. ... There’s no waiting for a day when conditions are better and the work will be safer. ... The cost of having a clear cell signal is blood and lives."
"When someone gets killed over something that [he] couldn’t control—that is what puts gray hairs on our heads."Next time you text a friend to complain that your four-star dinner was only worthy of two stars, think of Joel Metz.
Three years ago, while repairing a cellphone tower in Kentucky, the 28-year-old was hit by an errant cable. It decapitated Metz and left his headless body swinging some 240 feet in the air, still attached to the tower by his harness.
Modal Trigger
Since 2013, 35 cell-tower repair workers and builders have been killed so companies like Sprint, Verizon and AT&T can satisfy customers who freak when the bars decrease on their iPhones.
In his book “Tower Dog: Life Inside the Deadliest Job in America” (Soft Skull Press, out April 25), Douglas Scott Delaney offers an inside look at the profession that, in 2008, the head of US Occupational Safety & Health (OSHA) called “the most dangerous job in America.” Workers have perished after falling off of towers, dropping out of baskets attached to cranes, and being hit by falling debris. Occasionally, they even get electrocuted to death.
Delaney, 55, refers to himself and his fellow workers — some 15,000 people nationwide — as “tower dogs.” They comprise an industry that builds and maintains the 215,000 cellular towers, rising as high as 2,000 feet each, that ribbon the United States. These men and a small number of women toil for an average of $18 per hour while dealing with snow, rain, subzero temperatures and gale-force winds.
“A tower goes down, the cellphone companies start losing thousands of dollars per second and somebody has to fix it,” said Delaney, who entered the field in 1997 after years spent in Hollywood as a struggling screenwriter. Even if ice is falling from the sky, he added, “there’s no waiting for a day when conditions are better and the work will be safer . . . The cost of having a clear cell signal is blood and lives.”
Delaney, who lives in Reading, Kan., took his first climb during the dead of winter when the ground temperature hovered at 22 degrees Fahrenheit. By the time he cleared the tree-line, a stinging wind-chill-factor stomped the temp down to minus 8. Winds gusted at 45 mph.
He spent 11 hours up there even after he had what he called a “two-second heart attack,” when the belt holding him in place slipped by about an inch. “It slides down the steel and you feel like your body will not stop dropping,” he said. “The two seconds feel like two minutes and you think it’s all over.”
But the worst was when he was helping build a tower.
“We’re putting on 2,000 pounds of steel,” one circular piece at a time, Delaney recalled. “While I was tied on [to the ascending tower] with a leather harness, a 2,000-pound piece of steel hit me and I got turned upside down. Think about being hundreds of feet in the air and getting knocked on your ass . . . “I felt like a turtle on its back. I spent the next few minutes straining to get myself righted. Then I resumed working. What else was I going to do?”
Modal Trigger
Josh GarnerHe considers getting struck by lighting an inevitable occupational hazard. “It happens to most of us,” Delaney said, pointing out that there is an upside to hugging a steel tube as the bolts strike.
“When you are on the tower, you are part of the equipment. Your hair stands on end, your muscles ache, but the lightning goes right through you.” Meanwhile, “Guys on the bottom get thrown 20 feet and feel more beaten up the next day.”
They don’t complain, however, because they are the lucky ones.
Delaney added that 96 percent of cellphone-tower deaths (in 2016, seven climbers perished) are preventable, caused by faulty or misused equipment, and workers who take shortcuts. In one case, a tower dog plunged 150 feet to his death when he decided to speed his descent by rappelling down a tower rather than going rung-by-rung with an attached harness continuously protecting him.
“When somebody dies [by being careless] that we don’t know, we say, ‘Stupid son of a bitch,’ ” Delaney said. “But when someone gets killed over something that [he] couldn’t control — that is what puts gray hairs on our heads.”
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