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Re: [TowerTalk] Fall Zone

To: towertalk@contesting.com
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] Fall Zone
From: jimlux <jimlux@earthlink.net>
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2019 10:55:16 -0700
List-post: <mailto:towertalk@contesting.com>
On 7/8/19 10:38 AM, Glenn Pritchard wrote:
Boy is there a lot of misinformation here.

Glenn, VA7UO

Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 8, 2019, at 10:36 AM, jimlux <jimlux@earthlink.net> wrote:

On 7/8/19 9:34 AM, Jim Thomson wrote:
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2019 11:20:31 -0400 (EDT)
From: Wilson  Lamb <infomet@embarqmail.com>
To: undefined <towertalk@contesting.com>
Subject: [TowerTalk] Fall Zone
<I wouldn't want a neighbor's tower/Yagi looming over my backyard...and I love 
towers!
<The fall zone idea seems like simple good manners.
<I have been loosely involved in dropping 200' BC towers, dropped by cutting 
the rods at one guy anchor, thus losing all guys on that side.
<They fell absolutely full length, with a few sections not even bent!
<I think a foundation failure (soil, bolt, gin pole) would drop a crankup to 
full length.
<Is there any experience available on this?
<WL
##  per software,  Trylon self support  towers will  fail  at the junction  of the 4th 
 and  5th  section..... 40’  above ground.
UST  designs a weak  spot.... which  is  midway  up  the  3rd  section...  46.5 
 feet  above ground.
##  Never seen  a pix  of  either  tower folded  over... as  depicted  above.   
 40  ft...and  46.5 ft.   So dont  know if  their
design theory  works....or not.

It doesn't have to be a specially designed weak spot. Towers tend to 
bend/buckle in the middle anyway.

_



Well.. there's plenty of pictures of fallen towers out there. There are towers that have failed due to wind loads (typically due to ice buildup from a casual look) - free standing towers break somewhere in the middle, or are hung up by external supports (power line transmission towers are sort of a special case, they're free standing, but there's a power line holding them up, or at least constraining where they fail.

Crankups have all sorts of stress concentrations - where the sections overlap, for instance,

Guyed towers fail by crumpling up - a lot depends on what failed. If it was intentionally brought down in a particular direction, they do tend to lay out straight, because that makes it easier to haul away.

A guyed tower that fails because the anchor pulls out of the ground tends to fall and break, but sometimes "lays out" and sometimes doesn't, but there's almost always a "kink" in the middle somewhere (because of the physics of falling).

I think also that there's a substantial difference between a 1000 ft broadcast tower and a 100 ft ham tower. The broadcast tower is going to have multiple guy tiers and is probably a lot more "slender" (and flexible) than a ham tower.

Ham towers tend to have a lot of aerodynamic drag and mass at the top compared to broadcast towers. That's going to affect how it fails and falls.


But overall, I would think a building code type requirement for "must be at least the height from property line or structures" is a pessimistic worst case requirement. (and would prevent a lot of commercial structures from being built)


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