Lake Station Community Schools

Transcription

We're here today at the Ute tower site where we just completed restoration of the Ute tower. A fire tower. The last remaining one in Utah. The Ute tower was first built, constructed and completed in 1937 and was operated as a fire lookout tower. It's the last remaining fire lookout tower in Utah. Well the Ute tower is really significant to the local communities. They look at this and are just over joyed with the fact that we decided to renovate this and restore it. And the main reason is that it represents such an important part of the history of the area. And many people have experiences either coming up and looking at it or being a part of working here, and seeing it, and it had widespread community support. They're just excited about the completion of the tower. The tower's made out of wood, douglas fir that they milled. And over time, snow collects and water collects at the base and so in 1967 they did an evaluation of the tower and found out that there was major wood rot in the bottom and that the structural beams of the tower basically could fall over. So they did that repair in the 1980's, and rededication in 1987, that same type of damage had been happening, and we did another evaluation in 2008 and found the same type of rot in all four of the bottom legs. So we closed down the tower for safety purposes, our structural engineer indicated that the tower could fall at any time. We didn't want people up inside of it or underneath it. Because of the safety hazard. So we closed it down in 2008 and then we've been searching for funding and finally they began renovation where they replaced basically all four of the legs on the bottom and some of the cross pieces. To be able to come up here, see this and get an understanding of what they were doing and why they were doing fire suppression, this is one of the best places in Utah to be able to get an experience with that. And you go up and walk up the narrow stairs, you get up to the top of the catwalk, you look around and see the view and just getting an appreciation that this is a very remote location with the only connection you have with the outside world is basically a telephone line. People coming up here and watching fires, being in a very remote area and getting a sense of that is so different than the world we live in that has cars, roads, telephone poles, cell phones, everything like that. This allows you to have appreciation for history that you can't get in other places.