While skipping college for a year, I got a job in January of 1960 working at the missile sites east of Denver. I was hired as a surveyor by the Morrison-Knudsen Company to work at Complex 1-C, located on the old Lowry Bombing Range.
Our first assignment that morning was to verify the position of some steel plates located in the walls of the antenna silos.
As instrumentman, it was my job to set up the transit over a nail located in the concrete floor at dead center of the silo. In addition, located dead center of the silo was a stack of shoring serving as a stair to the top of the silo. This shoring consisted of prefabricated steel frames made of pipe that could be assembled into a 4-foot-by-8-foot rectangle rising 65 feet to the surface of the silo. Inside this rectangle was a series of prefabricated portable stair pieces that made it possible to climb to the top of the silo. To stabilize the shoring, many pieces of 2-by-4 lumber were wedged between the shoring and the wall of the silo. The silo was 38 feet in diameter.
Unfortunately, when one climbed the stairs to the top of the shoring there was no way to cross over to the wall of the silo; consequently, some carpenters were building a bridge from the wall of the silo to the shoring at the same time I was standing in the center of silo 67 feet below.
In attempting to push a 6-by-12-by-20-foot-long timber beam from the concrete wall of the silo to shoring in the center of the silo, they let it get away from them. Of course, when this happened, they yelled down the silo, “Look out below.”
About this time, I heard a lot of noise above me, so I poked my head out from the center of the shoring and all I could see was this big timber falling through the 2-by-4 braces and breaking them like match sticks, and the whole business was on its way down to where I was standing.
My first thought was to head for the tunnel between the two antenna silos, but then I would have scramble through the small steel bracing for the shoring and get to the tunnel about 10 feet away.
My second thought was to stay inside the steel shoring rectangle and hope for the best. At least I would be somewhat protected by the steel frame surrounding me.
It turned out that this was the best solution, because in just a second or two, all of the broken 2-by-4 braces began piling up around the shoring, and that big 6-by-12 timber landed about 3 feet away, between the tunnel and me.
Staying where I was proved to be a wise decision, because I was not even scratched.
The remainder of the crew had had time to take shelter in the tunnel, so they were fine. Of course, after all of the excitement, they helped dig me out from behind the pile of lumber on the floor of the silo and were quite surprised to see that I was just fine.
I guess the moral of the story is not to panic and jump too soon; you might be safer to just stand pat.
Needless to say, there wasn’t anything we could do now until the mess was cleaned up and the bracing was replaced, so we just headed to another assignment.
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