|
This guy sounded like a pro so he likely was climbing safely. What can
cause a Field Day tower to bend at the base? 1. Overloading a tower with too many large HF antennas is certainly a possibility during Field Day. 2. The tower may have been old and rusted inside although perhaps the rust was not visible on the outside. For Field Day you typically use some tower sections that someone has had laying around on the ground for years. 3. The tower may have been guyed incorrectly. If one of the three temporary Field Day guy anchors gave way then the other two may have pulled the tower over. If the tower base was well anchored then two of the legs could easily be bent by the fall of the tower itself. Number 3 actually happened to me during Field Day perhaps 10 years ago. The tower climber was near the top when one of the temporary guy lines started losing tension. I don't remember if the guy anchor was pulling out or the line itself (non-metallic, some type of rope) started loosening. The result was the tower started to topple over. A couple of us guys on the ground made a dash for the tower guy lines and the tower base. We managed to reach the slipping guy line and hold onto it. The tower was now 25 degrees or so tilted in the opposite direction but it stopped in that position and the climber scrambled down. If there had been another one or two seconds delay in reaching that guy line, the tower and the climber would have fallen all the way to the ground. Did I mention that the tower was on a mountaintop fire-lookout site and if the tower had fallen, it would have fallen NOT just to the ground but down into the canyon below? I'll remember this tower-fall event for the rest of my life. The root cause was either our sloppy installation of the temporary guy line anchor or the poor way the temporary rope guy line was tied off. jack Rick Kunze wrote: On 7/8/2009 5:45 AM, Josh Luthman wrote: -- Jack Unger - President, Ask-Wi.Com, Inc. Author - "Deploying License-Free Wireless WANs" Serving the Broadband Wireless Industry Since 1993 www.ask-wi.com 818-227-4220 [email protected] Twitter - "wireless_jack" |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: [email protected] Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
