A new SFGate feature draws attention to what most San Franciscans never think about: the five full-time staff and specialist contractors who maintain the 977-foot broadcast tower at 1 La Avanzada — racing fog windows to apply paint, riding a two-person cage elevator to the summit, and working through a three-year inspection cycle, one leg at a time.

A SFGate feature published this week, drawing a wave of attention on Reddit's r/sanfrancisco, asks a question most people who live under Sutro Tower's silhouette have never thought to pose: who actually goes up there?

The answer is a small, specialized workforce operating out of 1 La Avanzada Street in Twin Peaks — five full-time employees handling operations, power, and building maintenance, supplemented by a tight roster of outside contractors with a particular tolerance for height and hostile weather. To reach the summit of the 977-foot structure, workers ride a two-person cage elevator. At the top, on rainy nights, wind speeds can exceed 100 mph.

Bill Ruck has been part of that world longer than almost anyone. He started at the tower in 1978 when he joined KFOG-FM — now the FM side of sports-talk KNBR at 104.5 — one of the original FM tenants. Inducted into the Bay Radio Hall of Fame as Engineer of the Year in 2014, he's become what a Radio World profile from September 2025 called the tower's best living historian. "The more I look into it, the more I'm fascinated with the pioneers that did it when it had never been done before," he told that publication. He recalls early managers keeping "a foot of paper" of reports in a file drawer — the accumulated bureaucracy of maintaining a structure that four TV station groups (KTVU, KRON, KPIX, and KGO) jointly incorporated and built between 1971 and 1973.

The maintenance infrastructure is layered. Simpson Gumpertz & Heger, the structural engineering firm on contract since 2002, works through one-third of the tower each year on a three-year rotating inspection cycle — one leg and facing per pass, covering the full structure over three years. Painting is its own discipline. San Francisco's endemic fog means moisture defeats adhesion: Raider Painting, which handles structural steel coatings, monitors weather closely and times each coating window around moisture levels. The SF Department of Building Inspection accepted a formal inspection protocol for the structure in June 1999.

The current active project — lead abatement and replacement of the corrugated metal cladding panels on the horizontal trusses at levels 2 through 4, where laboratory testing confirmed the presence of lead paint dating to original 1972 construction — runs under Building Permit #2024.0118.4187. The SF Planning Commission approved the project on February 27, 2025, under mandatory discretionary review after neighbors pushed it off the consent calendar. Interior replacement panels were painted offsite before installation; exterior repainting is targeted for completion by 2027.

From down on Clayton Street or from a perch on the north peak of Twin Peaks, the work in progress is what you notice — the scaffolding, the seams of new cladding. What's harder to see is the decade-long rhythm beneath it: the annual engineer with a clipboard, the painters waiting on a fog break, the five-person staff keeping signals broadcasting to ten television stations and four FM frequencies across the Bay Area, every day, from a ridgeline that's been doing this since July 4, 1973.