What would you do for perfect cell phone reception where you live? Some of us are willing to go to any length to pull a couple extra bars from the air. At one New York City building, the landlord is putting his resident’s lives at risk, just to provide them with enough signal strength to download the latest fart app.
The tenants of 165 Pinehurst Avenue in New York City were told by their landlord that, thanks to freshly installed T-Mobile and AT&T antennas placed on top of their apartment buildings, the roof of their building would not be able to withstand the weight of one human being.
While wireless experts have commented that it’s “highly unliekly” that the base stations- which weigh roughly the same as three really fat men -would cause structual damage to the building, some tennants are reporting some frightening damage after the second of the two base stations were installed:
Long, zigzagging cracks have appeared along the building’s outer walls, and mortar has crumbled from the parapet, which supports hefty I-beams upon which the base stations sit.
Both T-Mobile and that Death Star company AT&T said that the installations are safe and up to building codes, even after the Buildings Department slapped the landlord with a violation after finding cracks in the building’s support beams. Several residents are going even further and suing the landlord for installing the base stations in the first place.
With good cell service being hard to come by in NYC, it’s good to have a base station closeby, but five bars won’t do you any good when said base station falls through your roof and kills you. Let’s not forget the tennants being drenched in radiation that’s far higher than the federal limit. But hey, cancer in 12 years is worth that text message about your friend’s bender last night. Right?
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