Around here, they disguise 'em as palm trees...
Posted on 12/16/2007 12:35:44 PM PST by Mr_Moonlight
Nearly a year after a Brooklyn man froze to death on the Adirondack Northway because he couldn't get cellphone service, the Spitzer administration has yet to fix the life-threatening problem.
Temperatures were well below zero when 63-year-old Alfred Langner's car went off the road in a treacherous 47-mile cell-phone “dead zone" last January. Unable to call for help, he succumbed to hypothermia 13 hours later, while his injured wife waited some 20 hours more before a passing state trooper noticed the vehicle.
But with the mercury dropping again, the dead zone remains - and the Spitzer team's foot-dragging is largely to blame.
True, some progress has been made. Spitzer's folks claim credit for brokering an agreement with Verizon to cover the zone with 11 cell towers.
But the towers won't be up until the middle or end of next year - far too late to do any good this winter. Indeed, the first tower only won final approval on Friday.
Such towers, see, require thorough environmental oversight from the Adirondack Park Agency - basically to ensure they don't spoil the view. (Greenie-griping is a chief reason why service is so spotty up there in the first place.)
Meanwhile, a temporary fix that would provide partial coverage for the coming months has been creeping forward at turtle speed - despite a million-dollar state earmark secured for the project in April.
The holdup apparently has been an unholy cycle of bureaucratic inertia and corporate hesitation - the kind that effective executive leadership could break.
But Gov. Spitzer's office has essentially telegraphed its ambivalence about the project. After all, it argues, lots of Upstate highways have limited cell service. So what's the big deal if folks are left stranded and incommunicado on this one stretch?
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
/sarc off
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
The first new tower is being erected in North Hudson right now - fills in a whopping 10% of the “dead spot”
—so now everywhere in the country has to have cell phone service—????
I am ambivalent about the cellphone towers. Are we so helpless in the cell phone era that we can’t be expected to put emergency equipment in our cars when driving in rural areas the winter?
New Yorkers pay the highest taxes of any state (by far) for the most incompetent government of any state.
And Spitzer may be the worst governor in the US. He certainly is the craziest.
And don’t get me started on our senators, Clinton and Schumer..... Excuse me while my head explodes.
I never leave home during the winter without adequate clothing to survive for extened periods without an external heat source no matter how far I’m driving. You can’t plan how far from help you’re going to be if you have an accident.
I don’t even have a cell phone.
Too bad the gentleman succumbed to hypothermia but sometimes you need to take responsibility for your own safety and not depend on the gubbmint. Especially when the gubbmint is run by socialists.
Well, because it would be offensive to the real trees, of course!
I am also ambivalent about them. I’ve heard people argue for putting them in park recreational areas as well. Once we start going down that path, there’s no end to it.
Why not just move everyone to satellite based communications? Then there wouldn’t have to be any “dead zones”.
Just as we must accept the global economy, we also should accept the number of cell phones and users in any part of the country.
Especially any place that is so remote (like the one mentioned) that a passing motorist would not see that there had been an accident and someone's life might be in danger.
I mean ... look at the friggin' artificial Christmas trees that are on display in any store that sells them.
This stretch of roadway is a major commercial and motorist thoroughfare between the US (New York State) and Canada (Quebec). it is located within a snowbelt. If one swerves off the roadway and into a deep ditch during a snowstorm, and nobody can see it, having cell-phone access can be the difference between life and death, as it was in this case.
If the ditch is deep enough there won’t BE cell phone service no matter where you are.
We have had them here in Colorado for over ten years. The tourists never see them. They do exist.
LOL.....I don’t know how the West was ever populated....what with those covered wagons without cell service!!!!
If this is true then I have to go with Da Spit on this one. Perfect World is just not ours to hold.
Around here, they disguise 'em as palm trees...
As best I can recalll, the Donner Party had no cell phones and they made do way back before Global Warming. They even got a pass named for them
Oh the Humanity! No cell phone towers! I have none where I live, we deal with it by being prepared.....blankets, full tank of gas, several coats and a pair of overalls.....
Spare me.
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