THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, April 29, 1995 TAG: 9504290343
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY LANE DEGREGORY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BUXTON LENGTH: Long : 110 lines
With the help of five Florida workers, and 165 gallons of paint, the country's tallest brick lighthouse is proudly showing its stripes again.
A restoration crew completed a third coat of paint on the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse late Friday afternoon. The barber-pole-striped beacon is the brightest it has been in 13 years. Navigators and tourists will easily see an improvement in the black-and-white bands.
National Park Service officials plan to open the 208-foot tower for free tours on Sunday.
``They're finishing up out there today. So all we'll have left to do is get the maintenance guys in to clean out the tower,'' National Park Service historian Chris Eckard said Friday from his Buxton office near the lighthouse. ``It looks great. We'll be able to get visitors back inside again Sunday.''
Although the National Park Service owns and operates the 125-year-old beacon, U.S. Coast Guard officials oversee its navigational aids: the light itself and the telltale stripes. Lighthouses along North Carolina's coast have distinctive patterns to alert sailors to their locations during daylight. The well-recognized markings on the Cape Hatteras lighthouse haven't been touched up since 1982.
A $70,000 contract for cleaning and repainting the lighthouse was signed in September. Originally, crews were to begin work in October. But problems with picking the paint, finding a way to contain paint chips, and working aroundweather delayed the project.
Painters from the American Lighthouse Restoration Co. in Ocala, Fla., finally arrived on the Outer Banks April 17. They had hoped to complete the job in a week. But high winds forced them inside several days, prolonging the project to two weeks.
``The weather just killed us,'' said Robby Horak, a 28-year-old lighthouse restoration worker who supervised four other men at the Buxton site. ``At times, the wind was blowing more than 40 knots. It's hard enough to hang out up there in that kind of blow anyway. But try spraying paint on, too - forget it.''
Horak's parents founded the American Lighthouse Restoration Co. about 10 years ago. Since then, they have renovated at least 12 oceanfront towers from California to Puerto Rico. The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, they said, was one of the toughest - as well as the tallest.
Workers had to build a special box to stand inside while they scraped and painted the barrier islands' most famous lighthouse. According to federal regulations, they had to contain every chip of the old, lead-based paint as it was scraped off. After three days of scraping, the crew had collected enough paint chips to fill a five-gallon bucket. The scrapings will be poured into concrete and buried in a landfill. Collecting them, Horak said, was the most tedious part of the project.
``There really wasn't much paint to scrape off,'' said Horak. ``The salt spray and sea had done a great job scouring it for us. It was just difficult to have to account for it all.''
To work on the tower, Horak and his crew rigged a special hoist contraption they called ``Sky Climber'' - similar to a window washer's stand but enclosed with wood and canvas. The platform was hooked to two electric motors that slid painters up and down the lighthouse.
``We worked up and down, then moved that Sky Climber around when we finished each top-to-bottom section,'' Horak said. ``We moved it 14 times altogether - that's how many times it took to get all the way around the tower.''
Two of the five workers also are expert rappellers. To paint beneath the balcony - and in other hard-to-reach places - they hooked ropes and climbing gear over the lighthouse top and lowered themselves down the sides. Painters for this project could not afford to be afraid of heights.
``We work really close up to the lighthouse when we're painting. So it isn't like you have to pay attention to the height unless you want to,'' said Horak, who does a lot of the climbing himself. ``This one was a lot taller than others we've done. But you got to see more that way, too. From up there, we had a real nice view of the beach - and of some pretty ladies in bikinis.''
Workers applied the black and white paint simultaneously, rather than letting one color dry first. By using 3,000 pounds of pressure to spray the colors on, Horak said there is no way the paint can run. ``When you're applying it with that much force,'' he said, ``it doesn't really go anywhere but right into the brick.''
The new paint is a flat latex that was specially designed to handle sea spray and high winds. Horak estimated that the lighthouse's face lift will last about eight years. Tourists, he said, seemed especially interested in the project.
More than 150,000 people climbed the lighthouse's 248 spiraling stairs in 1994. Summer days averaged 2,000 visitors. Horak said dozens of people watched his crew work this month.
``The most commonly asked question we got was, `Are you painting the lighthouse?' After the first few times, we'd just call down to them, `No,' and keep on working. Most of them would then realize what a dumb question that was,'' Horak said. ``But a few just looked at us puzzled, like, `Well, what ARE they doing then?'
``You can sure tell, though, now that we're done. When we got here, you could hardly see that the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse was striped. Now, it looks primo.'' MEMO: CAPE HATTERAS LIGHTHOUSE
Built: 1870 at Buxton on the Outer Banks
Height: 208 feet, the tallest brick lighthouse in the United States
Paint: 150 gallons of black and white for spiral stripes on tower; 15
gallons of red for octagonal brick base; flat latex used
Visitors: About 150,000 people visit the beacon each year; on summer
days, an average of 2,000 people visit the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse
Tours: Visitors center is open seven days a week; lighthouse will
open Sunday. Free tours of the tower will run from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
daily until the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. After that, the free
tours will be run from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily.
For more information, call the National Park Service (919) 995-4474.
by CNB