5 Features To Look For In A Light Tower For Emergency Natural Disaster Clean Up
With residents potentially trapped in the rubble of houses flattened by tornado or earthquake damage, your rescue team can't wait until the sun rises again to begin clean up. Rolling out a reliable source of light allows the team to work through the night and achieve faster results that could save lives. Before you call a rental company to secure the delivery of the light towers rentals you need, ask if they can supply models with these five important features for a safer disaster clean up site.
Wind Resistance
With many dangerous storms continuing to create high winds hours or even days after they pass, disaster sites often get hit by gusts that can tip over top-heavy light towers. Most towers can handle wind up to 65 miles per hour due to the weight of the generator anchoring it. If you're expecting gusts higher than 65 mph, request additional anchoring hardware to connect the mast with stakes driven into the ground that prevent tip-overs.
Tilting Power
When setting up outdoor lighting for fixed operations, it's easy to point each reflector in the right direction and brighten up a big oilfield or stadium. However, the demand for light changes quickly in an unstable disaster zone. Adjustable lights work best in these situations so you can illuminate a specific building or area when crews send out an alert for rescuing an injured person.
Since 30 or 50 foot tall light tower masts take a while to raise and lower for manual adjustment, it's smarter to rent an appliance outfitted with remote controls for adjusting tilt. This lets an organizer or director man the tower and point more light towards areas needing the most work. Since demands for rescue can change in a second with each new discovery, you need equipment that changes just as quickly.
Fuel Sources
How is the fuel availability in the area of the disaster? Most light towers are built on top of diesel generators, a fuel that quickly goes out of stock when residents need it for running their own generators. Alternative fuel sources like hydrogen fuel cells and solar panels let you keep working despite shortages in liquid fuels.
Non-diesel generators also offer a few other safety benefits for the disaster site:
- No combustible fumes or exhaust clouds
- Less clutter from fuel storage containers and tanks
- Fewer trips out to the nearest gas station to stay stocked up
- Lower fuel costs over the extent of the clean up
Color Gels
Triage is the most important task in disaster clean up that involves missing and injured victims. This means many of the light towers deployed to a site will point into the first aid tents so the EMTs can stabilize people who might have spent hours or days under a piece of their home. Color gels let you turn the lights into triage markers as well, helping emergency excavators move the people they find to the right tent as quickly as possible.
Portability
Finally, consider the uneven surfaces and debris that clutters the usual disaster scene. The light towers need flat and even surfaces to sit on, with the amount of space needed going up with the amount of light they produce. You may need to rent a number of smaller units to arrange them around the edges of the disturbed ground and debris instead of trying to light up the whole area with a single big light.
Connect with a local provider for light towers during the safe season so you're prepared before it's time for tornadoes and hurricanes. You'll already have your hands full when a wildfire sweeps through or a bridge collapses. Securing the lighting you need with one call frees you up to move on to the next important phone call.
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