There is a room at the back of the TX building that has been fondly nicknamed the Spider Room. It is a name that is well-earned, and one in which anyone with a spider phobia would have avoided at all costs. The room I am referring to was (I'll get to the past tense reference in a moment) also called the air intake/storage room. It was a room that had decorative block along two sides allowing air to be sucked in by the transmitters to keep things cool. Now remember that we are on an island and our site is located very closely to the ocean, thus all that air that was coming in to cool the transmitters (through filters), was also full of salt. As they started to remove all the metal parts from around the room, they found that most of the metal was completely rusted through . . . and then there were these huge (personal biased opinion) banana spiders! (pictures above) Seems they had decided to make this room their very own special arachnid condo. So, last week, with gritted teeth, great bravery, and a backhoe, the men of valor approached the task of bringing down the "air vent" walls. Kudos go to the original builders of this room because when the guys tried to take down the walls with a sledgehammer, they made little progress thus it became a job for the backhoe. But oh how I imagine the guys thought that was fun!
Other projects finished last week were to pour a concrete pad for the generator (see pictures above), and to take down a bathroom to make room for the much longer transmitters to come.
This week, the destroyed walls will be replaced by solid concrete blocks to close in the "spider" room. It will now become a storage room that will also double as the shop for building maintenance tools. Once again the move of the shop was made necessary to expand the width of the TX room for the new transmitters.
