Rich Bradley missed the call for his liver transplant because he didn’t have cell-phone service. The Bradleys’ land line in the northern Sullivan County hamlet of Willowemoc was out on that icy November night. So around midnight, the hospital tried to reach Bradley and his wife Barbara on their cell phones. After nine months of waiting, a liver for a transplant had been found.
The Bradleys never got the calls that could save Rich’s life in their home set among pine trees just eight straight miles off Route 17. They never got the calls from their son in Queens — who tried to reach his parents after the hospital called him.
It was only the next morning, after Barbara drove some four miles, that she had enough bars on her Verizon phone to see that Westchester Medical Center had called at midnight, 1 a.m., 1:30 a.m. and on through to 3 a.m.
“We have a liver,” the calls said. “We need to speak with you.”
By then, it was too late.
“You only have hours for a liver to be harvested, to keep it going, to keep it fresh,” says Barbara, who notes that her husband finally got his transplant last month. “But it really could have been a matter of life and death.”
Not a luxury, but a necessity
The lack of cell-phone service in wide swaths of the region — from Route 6 near Bear Mountain in Orange County to Route 97 along the Delaware in Sullivan on up to Routes 28 and 209 in the Catskills of Ulster — isn’t just an annoying inconvenience of calls that vanish into the mountain air and conversations that break up like crackling ice.
Cell phones are a link to life.
An Ulster County woman almost died last summer when her Subaru veered off Route 28 near Phoenicia and toppled some 30 feet down a ravine. There was no cell service in the area, so Lynn Parker, the 83-year-old driver, had not gotten a cell phone that would have enabled her to call 911 had it been available. So if it hadn’t been for highway workers and their two-way radios …
“I would not have survived,” says Parker.
When hundreds of Verizon customers with little or no cell coverage in the Ulster Town of Olive lost land-line service for 10 days last winter because of an equipment foul-up, “residents were without the ability to make emergency calls to ambulance, police or fire,” wrote an angry Ulster County Executive Mike Hein to Verizon. He stressed he was “gravely concerned about the lack of cellular service in widespread areas of Ulster County.”
So why isn’t the mid-Hudson blanketed with cell-phone coverage?
Mountains and money are the prime reasons, says Sullivan County Public Safety Commissioner Dick Martinkovic, a former Verizon executive who knows the business.
All of the region’s mountains mean more towers must be erected to cover the area. And with a cost of about $350,000 per tower – with more to maintain and upgrade it, build roads to it and pay rent to the landowner – that means a big investment for the tower management company that builds it.
The tower must also win approval from a municipality – and overcome any opposition from folks who believe it will mar mountains like the Shawangunks or Catskills.
All of which means a phone company must have enough customers to make its investment worthwhile – since coverage isn’t mandated by the government.
Says Martinkovic, “Will a company put up a cell tower in a remote area because three people are lost? No.”
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