The New Canaan Transfer Station & the Case of the Missing Balloon

You would think a towering balloon representing a cell tower would be a hard thing to miss, but Thursday afternoon, the balloon scheduled to be found at the New Canaan transfer station was nowhere to be found.

"It was here a little while ago," said one city worker at the station. "I have no idea where it went. The thing was 30-feet high. You wouldn't have been able to miss it!"

The test, scheduled from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the transfer station off Lakeview Avenue, was supposed to allow the phone company to collect visual photo data on what a proposed cell tower would look like in the area. The tower was proposed to increase emergency response times in the town.

The balloons, which were supposed to be floating roughly thirty feet in the air, would have given a visual approximation of what a tower would have looked like at the location. The tower was anticipated to raise approximately $100,000 in revenue for the town annually, if multiple carries piggybacked off the signal as anticipated.

The only thing wrong with the test was the by about 12:30 p.m. Thursday, the balloons were ready gone. Workers at the transfer station weren't sure to where the balloons had disappeared, so patch reached out to Geoffrey Pickard of the Utilities Commission.

"I'll tell you what happened," Pickard said. "They moved the start time to 7 a.m. So they could try and wrap up the test by noon-time when it started to rain. It was there this morning."

Pickard said since this was a preliminary test, a more formal balloon test would be presented to the public once a lease was finalized with AT&T, which he anticipated would be the case.

So, if you planned on taking a trip out but missed this preliminary test, no worries, you'll have your chance to see a visual approximation of the tower soon! In the meantime, Patch has reached out to AT&T to see if one of their photos could be passed along for display. They've promised to get in touch with the engineers in charge and get back to us.