It was a frigid 17 degrees when Louis “Tom” Freund was descending a three-legged communications tower in a hayfield in Ohio. At 40 feet up, he had a splendid view of the frosted brown stalks stretching to the horizon where the cold earth met a cloudless winter sky. Tom was at the top of his game: At 42, he was running a multimillion-dollar company providing broadband Internet access to rural areas. He’d just remarried and was in superb physical shape, capable of clambering up 250-foot-high towers with 40 pounds of tools on his back, leaving colleagues half his age in his wake.
But on this day, Feb. 16, 2009, a weld snapped underfoot — something no amount of experience or physical prowess could have prevented. “I heard a loud ping, and I knew I was coming down,” he remembers.
Slicing through the icy air, he watched as the tower toppled away from him. He rode it part of the way down and at the last minute, twisted, catlike, to avoid being crushed. His aerial acrobatics saved his skull from smashing into the steel girders a moment later. The tower hit the ground, then he hit the tower, his chest smashing onto the icy metal frame. His shoulder and the right side of his head slammed into the ground. Even though a bright white haze clouded his vision, he remained conscious. “All I heard,” Tom explains slowly, “was a freight train siren going off in my head. It was deafening.”
The impact shattered his pelvis and his shoulder, broke the ribs on his right side and damaged his spine and neck. Two lobes of his lungs exploded. As he lay on the frozen ground, which served as a big ice pack, a local medic called to the scene by Tom’s assistant gave him oxygen until a helicopter flew him to Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh. He faded in and out of consciousness. The medics forced him to talk to his wife and kids over the radio, convinced he wouldn’t survive.
