When Brent Walker, President, World Tower Company, couldn’t find any C-clamps in his tower manufacturing facility, he knew he had lost everything to the EF4 tornado that struck Mayfield, KY on Friday, December 10, 2021. The deadly storm, which traveled 165 miles on the ground through western Kentucky, destroyed World Tower’s 60,000 square foot facility and a separate 20,000 square foot facility. But the company’s offices, which are between the two manufacturing buildings, were left unscathed.
The story of how quickly World Tower has bounced back since that day is characterized by perseverance and fortitude. By the Monday after the storm, Walker and his employees were pulling towers out of the wreckage onto the front yard, checking them for damage and shipping them out. More finished towers arrived on trucks from the galvanizer, winding their way through the maze of National Guard, CNN and Fox News vehicles. They would also need to be shipped out. “I was amazed at the number of towers we shipped out over the next two weeks,” he said. It took only four months and the use of a temporary facility in Fulton, TN, 20 miles away, to get the assembly line running again.
The Comeback
Walker says he was humbled by the support from the community and leadership displayed by his staff under such stressful circumstances. He credits the hard work of a team of employees with the company’s ability to come back quickly.
“That core of employees was unbelievable,” he stated. “They took the company and put it on their shoulders and moved it,” Walker said. “Our key people hung in there and just wanted to know what they could do to help. They all chipped into the movement. We dug equipment that we could salvage out of the factory that had collapsed and moved the small amount of equipment to set up in another city.” Also critical to its survival, World Tower was able to maintain some of its staff of nearly 40 employees because the wireless industry donated a substantial amount of money to support them during the time the company was offline.
Today, 11 months later, World Tower is back to fabricating lattice towers, which it has done since Walker’s father, Doug, purchased the company in 1994. A car wash now resides where the family-owned business began building towers. Brent joined his father’s company 20 years ago and purchased the remaining 51 percent in 2020. He still remembers when they purchased their first forklift as they grew the company. Today, World Tower lives up to its name, shipping towers around the globe from the Marshall Islands to Vietnam, as well as in its backyard in eastern Kentucky.
Small, But Mighty
World Tower specializes in tower design, manufacturing and installation and uses its small size to pay extra attention to every project that comes in the door. “Whether it be a small purchase of fabricated steel or a large turnkey project, we see every order through to completion and beyond, with attention to detail and a responsiveness that we believe is unmatched in the industry,” Walker said. “It is this type of service that has helped to develop long-lasting relationships with our dedicated customers, who we consider part of the World Tower family.”
World Tower provides the communications industry with reliable, economical guyed and self-supporting towers. Each structure is fabricated from the ground up and the fundamental guyed tower is welded with face widths ranging from 18 to 60 inches. All towers are made from solid steel and welded by certified welders. Its self-support towers, which can reach heights of 500 feet, are constructed of steel pipe or solid steel legs joined by angle iron cross members.
The company, which averages 350 towers a year, will build around 225 towers in 2022. That is quite impressive, considering that it was offline for the first four months of the year. “We should be at full capacity next year, with what we have forecasted and the contracts we’ve got right now to build. We’ve got the orders in the pipeline,” Walker said.
The Future
Although the memory of the natural disaster is still fresh, Walker has his sights set squarely on the future. World Tower has rebuilt 20,000 square-feet of manufacturing space behind its office in Mayfield, and it has plans to develop a 20,000 square-foot building across the road within the next year and a half or two years, which would allow them to bring the temporary operations back from Tennessee. Eventually, that building will be expanded to 40,000 feet.
From what has been forecasted, World Tower is going to be busy for the foreseeable future building towers for cellular, broadcast, energy, meteorological, military, emergency management and more. Walker welcomes the challenge.
“There are very few problems we have yet to solve and gladly accept new challenges every day,” he said. “If you have a site that needs to be built and aren’t sure where to start, send us an email today and we will develop a solution for you.”
For more information, visit http://worldtower.com/ or call (270) 247-3642.
By J. Sharpe Smith, Inside Towers Technology Editor
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