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 ...
