I watched a 480ft cell tower crash to the ground. Good times. Vid to follow (I hope - damn .mov files!)
Link to vid of tower demolition:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8Pfo...ature=youtu.be
425ft or so guy tower. Tower repairs need and not worth the cost of those repairs when we have a 1700ft tower 1 mile away. Moved remaining customer to other tower and dropped this one.
There are 2 anchor points in each of the 3 guy paths (inner and outter - total of 6). Inners are bottom to mid tower and outters are mid tower to top. About 4 guy wires on each anchor (total of 8 in each guy path). To drop these, you crank up the tension on the outters of one guy path, and cut one of the others. Vid starts w/ one opposite outter anchor cut off at ground level. Tower should have fallen then. It didn't and was just hanging there swaying in the wind. This not the way it is suposed to go. Some poor low man on the pole got to go to the inner anchor and cut the wire that connects to the mid point. You will see the tower unflex some as that wire gets cut. Then it goes. The pop you hear is a 3" diameter .125" wall tube leg fail in tension and the other two legs fold in half. The next sound is the wind whistling as the top swings to the ground. I was about 200ft or so from the base of the tower (just outside the outter anchor). Background noise is my work truck as I'm filing this over the hood of the truck.
Tower landed on some live utility lines. We had to assume for almost 2 hrs that the tower was hot. There was a 1ft deep by 5ft wide crater where the top hit. First time I got to see one fall. It was pretty cool.
Last edited by GlennCMC70; 09-18-2012 at 10:19 PM.
Tower landed on some live utility lines?
Al Fernandez
Yep. Power was suposed to be turned off the day before. After 2 hour of trying to get them back out that morning, we said F it, they should have done thier job. This was trip two for the crew to drop this tower and trip one was a bust for the same reason. We figured the transformer fuse would blow. It didn't, and we had to assume it was hot.
Saw the only flight worthy surviving DeHavalland Mosquito in the world today at the Air New Zealand Technical base in Auckland. The plane was restored in Ardmore, NZ at a cost of 15 Million dollars and took 8 years to complete. This was it's first landing since it was restored. Really cool stuff.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeHavilland_Mosquito
Marshall Mosty
AI/SI Texas Regional Director
2011 NASA-TX American Iron Champ
AI #67 "Mosty Brothers' Racing" (RIP)
ST6 #21 Toyota Corolla (being revived)...
"Saw the only flight worthy surviving DeHavalland Mosquito in the world today at the Air New Zealand Technical base in Auckland. The plane was restored in Ardmore, NZ at a cost of 15 Million dollars and took 8 years to complete. This was it's first landing since it was restored. Really cool stuff."
That is so cool!
Orange moved under its own power... and didn't hit anything.
#39 CMC Camaro
Orange is Fast!
CMC-NT01 FTW!
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