I would respectfully suggest that the issue here is that Hams are cheap and
often do not "properly engineer and construct" towers. If we all had to
have the engineering documentation to PROVE that our towers were built to
the specifications to which we all ASSUME power poles, billboards, etc. were
constructed to (even if not), then perhaps the normal lore and legend would
be that ham towers are as safe as these other "towers."
Hopefully we will never get to these very stringent (and perhaps assumed)
regulations on other public tower-like structures. None of us would
probably build them! (Local regulations are bad enough.)
But the "not intended consequences" are that the non-ham public doesn't
trust us to engineer our towers properly.
Hence the issue -- neighbors have no history or objective reason to just
accept our towers.
73 -- Larry -- W1DYJ
-----Original Message-----
From: JVarney
Sent: Tuesday, July 09, 2019 12:16
To: towertalk@contesting.com
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] Fall Zone
I see the "fall zone" issue as more of a political or social issue. In
every city there are telephone poles, billboards, streetlights, traffic
signals, flagpoles, etc., all within the fall zone of neighboring
properties. Those are fully accepted by society and rarely questioned for
fall safety. But as soon as we put up a ham tower we freak out about
towers falling over.
For some reason we accept wooden telephone poles carrying 12 kV overhead as
"safe" despite the fact that the engineering of telephone poles is far less
thorough than for ham towers. There's no engineered foundation, just a
hole drilled in the ground based on rule of thumb (typically 10% of pole
length plus 2 feet). Wood, especially buried wood, is far more prone to
degradation than galvanized steel or aluminum.
I'd argue that the failure rate of wooden poles carrying overhead power is
far higher than that of ham towers.
A properly engineered and constructed ham tower can be made just as safe as
any other vertical structure. There is no logical reason to single them
out for "fall zone" concerns.
73 Jim K6OK
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