We mentioned last year how very difficult it was for cell-phone people to drive over the mountains here, closing big deals on the wireless. Gosh, you're about to buy low and sell high - or buy high and sell low if you're a Bishop Estate trustee - when suddenly your signal is cut off by those pesky tunnels. What's a car-bound financier to do? Pali Tunnel soon a cell phone zone
In the case of the Wilson Tunnel, a bristling battery of cell-phone antennae were erected. And we explained it last year when citizens were confused by the green-painted apparatus outside the tunnel.
Now there's work being done on the Pali tunnel. Ladders and dirt piles and rubbish slides and scaffoldings and, most telling, a portable toilet, where a man can get some privacy as he quietly meditates two feet away from a roaring highway. What's the deal?
Same deal. Or so explains Ross Smith of the state Department of Transportation.
A consortium of cell-phone companies have kicked in together and are building an antenna farm atop the Pali Tunnel abutments. Over the next week or so, one tunnel or another will be closed at night for wiring inside.
The goal is the same: gloriously uninterrupted cell-phone signals. Motorized financiers can close deals. Maybe when this is completed, our state economy can get back on track. Thumbs up, Hawaii, there's light at the end of the tunnel!
Burl Burlingame, Star-Bulletin
