THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, April 17, 1995 TAG: 9504170107
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY LANE DEGREGORY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BUXTON LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines
Cape Hatteras' black-and-white beacon will not open as planned this month.
The nation's tallest brick lighthouse will be getting a face lift, instead.
This morning, workers plan to begin repainting the famous spiral stripes on the 208-foot-tall structure. Originally, the project was scheduled to be finished last November.
National Park Service officials had hoped to open the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse last Friday.
The new deadline is May 11, but officials are waiting for the job to be done before they declare an opening date for the 1995 summer season.
More than 150,000 people climbed the lighthouse's 248 stairs in 1994. Summer days averaged 2,000 visitors. Tours of the tower are free.
Although the beacon is closed, National Park Service rangers are keeping the Cape Hatteras Visitors' Center open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Vacationers and local residents are welcome to watch the painting process.
``We expect the contractors to be aboard Monday,'' today, U.S. Coast Guard Chief Ray Gray said from his Hatteras Island office Thursday. ``That's what they told us, at least.''
With at least 170 gallons of acrylic latex paint, workers with the American Lighthouse Restoration Co. will spruce up the exterior of the 125-year-old tower this month. The Florida firm plans to send at least five painters rappelling from cables attached to the lighthouse balcony. High-pressure spray guns will be used instead of brushes or rollers.
Although the National Park Service owns and operates the beacon, Coast Guard crews oversee its navigational aids: the light itself and the tell-tale barber-pole pattern. Last fall, a lieutenant with the U.S. Coast Guard's civil engineering unit in Cleveland, Ohio, said the painting project had to keep getting pushed back because of technical problems with the contract. Before painting the lighthouse, Coast Guard Lt. Andy Kimos said, workers will scrape the structure by hand to remove old paint.
All lead-based paint must be contained - and kept out of the environment. So workers will enclose the tower in canvas or plastic, line the ground below, collect all of the paint chips, encase the scrapings in concrete, and bury the package in a landfill.
The federal contract for lighthouse cleaning and painting is about $70,000, Kimos said.
The last time the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse got a paint job, in 1982, taxpayers paid $18,500. ILLUSTRATION: A towering paint job
[Color Photo]
DREW C. WILSON
Staff
The barbershop-pole design of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, last
painted in 1982, lets sailors know where they are along the coast.
by CNB