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NewsMay 12, 2002

ST. GEORGE REEF, Calif. -- First, the fog delayed the volunteers trying to restore a 110-year-old lighthouse by carrying a 5-ton lantern by helicopter over the cascading Pacific Ocean. Then came the rain, and the plan to move the lantern which had been shattered two years earlier during a similar effort was put off again. Volunteers were left to wonder when they would have another chance...

By Jennifer Coleman, The Associated Press Writer

ST. GEORGE REEF, Calif. -- First, the fog delayed the volunteers trying to restore a 110-year-old lighthouse by carrying a 5-ton lantern by helicopter over the cascading Pacific Ocean.

Then came the rain, and the plan to move the lantern which had been shattered two years earlier during a similar effort was put off again. Volunteers were left to wonder when they would have another chance.

But the next morning, Guy Towers and the rest of his restoration team saw the rain weaken. They made their move, and soon the helicopter hovered in the drizzle, picked up the lantern room and carried it to St. George Reef Lighthouse as about 100 spectators huddled in the Crescent City harbor.

For fans of a lighthouse that has seen plenty of disasters, it was what they hoped was more than a break in the weather. They hoped it would signal the revival of a lighthouse that once steered seafarers away from the ship-eating reef.

If successful, the restoration by the St. George Reef Lighthouse Preservation Society could create a tourist attraction in a forgotten corner of California whose logging and fishing industries have faded.

Named for dragon slayer

Sitting six miles off the far northwestern coast, the 150-foot lighthouse cost $704,000 to build and started operating in 1892. Named after the dragon-slaying St. George, it sits surrounded by the "dragon rocks" that tore the bottom from the steamer Brother Jonathan in 1865 and killed 166 passengers and crew.

The lighthouse built to tame the rocks was the most expensive built by the federal government. The deadliest, too.

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Between then and 1975, when it was replaced by a buoy, the lighthouse saw five of its workers die, including three U.S. Coast Guardsmen killed in 1951 when their boat capsized as they left the rock.

Replacing the 16-sided, 12-foot-high lighthouse dome has bedeviled Towers and the other volunteers. Bad weather kept them from making the helicopter trip; no one wanted to risk $60,000 for the cost of the dome and the helicopter for a failure.

When it's done, the society will have turned the St. George Reef Lighthouse into the only one of three offshore lighthouses in the world that will be open to the public. Once there, visitors will learn more about its turbulent history.

A retired social worker, Towers first became interested in lighthouses in the early 1980s when he discovered the Punta Gorda lighthouse in Humboldt County. He then embarked on a two-decade obsession, in which he once spent three years cataloging the world's lighthouses.

In 1986, after he had moved to Crescent City, he learned the government readied to sell the lighthouse as scrap. Towers and several friends formed the nonprofit preservation society and then spent 10 years getting government approvals to take jurisdiction over the lighthouse.

He worked closely with Bob Bolen, a retired airline mechanic who was instrumental in removing and transporting the lighthouse's giant Fresnel lens in 1983. The 18-foot rotating lens now sits in the Del Norte County Museum.

Bolen helped hire a helicopter to bring it back to the lighthouse. To restore the lighthouse will be worth it, he said.

"To me, they're monuments to our forefathers who came to our country and to the men who didn't make it."

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