North Dakota High

The world’s tallest structure is not the Sears Tower, the Space Needle, or those strange conjoined skyscrapers in Kuala Lumpur. The acme of human achievement isn’t even in a city. It stands a few miles outside the hamlet of Blanchard, in rural northeast North Dakota. Two million feet of one-foot-thick steel guy-wire stretch upward in graceful arcs to support a tower that reaches more than a third of a mile into the air.

It is a TV antenna. Viewed from the ground, its top is nearly lost in space and its shadow extends out of sight to the horizon. It may not be in the running as the tallest actual “building” (that is, something with a roof and walls that people inhabit every day, answering telephones and writing memos—the Petronas Towers in Malaysia get that prize), but the North Dakotan marvel really is the tallest man-made thing.

KTHI-TV and KVLY 11 raised this 2,063-foot tower in 1963 to send their signal to homes across “an area larger than the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Connecticut with one thousand square miles to spare,” as noted in promotional literature about the colossus. The television stations also tout their tower as “taller than the combined height of the Great Pyramid Khufu at Giza, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and the Washington Monument.”

The Blanchard television tower is in the heart of the Red River “Valley,” the same valley that floods so dramatically because the only rise in the perfectly level landscape is the occasional roadbed raised five feet above the fields (to allow easy escape during flood season). This green pancake topography presents no barriers for the tower to connect the prairie to the world. Like most things in North Dakota, the tower does not get a lot of publicity. If there are Homeland Security agents about, they are hiding, because this little-known monument does not appear to be protected by anything other than “No Trespassing” signs and the dirty looks of locals. In fact, I can’t see anyone within about thirty miles across the flat prairie.

Still, what visitor wouldn’t want to take a thrill ride up the mini elevator inside that takes workers part-way up the tower? Actively trying to dissuade nosey Minnesotans, KTHI warns that the top will sway ten feet on a windy day and “the signals atop the tower are so strong they can hurt the fillings in a person’s teeth.”

The television station’s cautionary brochure brags, “If a twenty-second commercial started at the same moment a baseball was dropped from the top of the KVLY tower, it would end nearly four seconds before the ball hit the ground and it would be traveling 250 mph.” Whew, talk about excitement!—Eric Dregni


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.