Tower foreman Sandra Terry enjoys her time 500 feet in the air and with family
Sandra Terry got her start in climbing steel towers by working in another metal-related industry: iron. Terry told Inside Towers she had been doing ironwork for about four months when she started chatting with a colleague about harnesses.
“He said ‘yeah I climb towers,’” Terry explained. “I was, like, ‘what do you mean?’ He told me what it was about and I was intrigued. I told him to get me a job and he said ‘okay.’” Although the company her friend worked for wasn’t initially sold on training a young woman, literally, from the ground up, she just started showing up every day. “I think they thought I was crazy, but then they hired me.”
Fast forward several years later, Terry is now a foreman with Denver-based Wyco Field Services managing a crew that mostly does AT&T installs and upgrades, but she said she’s had a little taste of everything, jobwise. In a male-dominated business, she said she has occasionally had a few workers that have had a hard time with a female being their boss but said they simply end up going to another crew. She credits her rise up the tower climbing ladder to her training, both on and off the job site, and work ethic.
“Every person I have worked with or for has taught me,” Terry said citing Comtrain, NATE and Kathy Gill’s Tower Safety & Rescue rigging courses in Arizona. In addition, she has completed certification classes for CPR and RF awareness. Although Terry prefers to cite the exhilaration, sense of accomplishment and teamwork inherent in climbing towers, she has had a sobering moment or two.
“There have been many times where I have said, ‘okay, this is it, we may not be living after this.’”
Once, when she was climbing by herself to the top of a 500-foot tower, she saw a farmer plowing his field below. She watched nervously as his tractor swept narrowly past the guy wires and thought Baker, Montana might just be the site of her final climb. On climbing the taller structures, Terry said the swaying near the top can get unnerving and it helps to have someone with you to share their anxiety. “If I get uneasy I’ll just talk to one of the other guys,” she said. “Sometimes they’ll say ‘yeah I’m scared too.’”
Overall, she gives high marks to the men in the industry for accepting her as a boss and co-worker and she converts any doubters by putting in the work, just as they do. “Once they see I can do the same as them, they come around,” she said.
Would she recommend this work for other women? “Absolutely,” she said. “It’s a group effort. As they say, ‘team work makes a dream work’ and I am living my dream.”
By Jim Fryer, Inside Towers Managing Editor
This article is part of Inside Towers’ Climber Chronicles series, sponsored by VIAVI Solutions. Learn more about their One-Advisor 800 product here.
Reader Interactions