Grand Island, N.Y. (WBEN) - It's a job not for the faint of heart.
In order to be able to hear WBEN in your cars or on your radios at home, we rely on our towers in order to transmit our signal across the region. However, with the towers being as tall as they are, they also need to be visible for those in the air.
That's where experts like those from Kilowatt broadcast specialties come in to paint the towers, making them more visible for everyone. This includes Nikki Mercurio and his team, who were in Western New York recently to give a fresh coat of paint to the Audacy towers across the region.
Mercurio says the process of painting one of the broadcast towers is one that would shy away most people.
"Ideally, you want to start at the top, but you can start wherever," said Mercurio in an interview with WBEN.
"We have a five-point harness, so we're tied off to the tower at all times. And then we have our paint cans just hung off to the loops on our belt. We usually have to climb up with 3-to-4 paint cans."
He says the climb to the top of the towers usually depend on the size of the towers. WBEN's towers in Grand Island are an estimated 20-to-30-minute climb to the top, and that's while also climbing 3-to-4 gallons of paint at a time.
Overall, each tower takes about 2-to-3 days to paint from top-to-bottom, and is dependent on good weather as well.
So what goes into the process of painting one of these broadcast towers? Mercurio says it starts with scraping away any loose paint, and then priming any rust and corrosion. Then the paint goes on in aviation orange and white.
"You just have a open can of paint and a car wash mitt. You dunk the mitt, and wipe it on like your finger painting," Mercurio said.
"[Aviation orange will] look red, it kind of depends. We have two different types of paint we've been using, but it just depends how it was mixed and how it dries."
Mercurio says they usually use acrylic and latex paint, but it depends on what the customer orders, or what they decide to order.
"It all lays on differently, sometimes the white cover is better than the red, sometimes it's the other way around. Sometimes they don't cover very well, so you have to double coat and essentially paint the tower twice," he said.
He adds if pilots and others can clearly see the towers, then they know it's a job well done.
Mercurio says he first got into painting broadcast and other towers across the country several years, and has been doing it with Kilowatt for about eight years. He says it's usually shock and confusion from others asking what he does for a living, because many don't understand what goes into this type of work.
And with traveling across the country on a number of different jobs, he says whenever there's a free moment, they take in the sites and get their pictures.
"Sometimes there's not much to look at. Like the Midwest, where we're from, it's just flat. There's nothing to look at. Here, we can, at least, see the mist of Niagara Falls and, at least, all the water and trees around," Mercurio noted.
