Tower take down video

Since the inception of youtube, I’ve watched hundreds of this tower collapse videos. I don’t know why, it interests me. This video is of the Coast Guard LORAN C tower in Port Clarence, Alaska. For what it’s worth, Port Clarence looks like a forlorn place, I am inclined to think my duty on Guam was rather nice in comparison.

This was filmed from six separate camera locations, including one at the base. It demonstrates how most towers fall within 1/3 of their constructed height. In this demolition, all three guy points are cut at the same time, removing the equalizing forces simultaneously. This would be the same situation as a catastrophic failure of a load-bearing tower member.

The best parts of this video are the camera view of the tower base, around 1:04-1:19, and the side view where the camera almost gets hit by a tower section, 2:02-2:13.

I love physics.

3 thoughts on “Tower take down video”

  1. Remember the AM tower with the broken guys I mentioned to you a while back? They finally took it down at the end of February, kept it very quiet for some reason. I noticed their field strength was WAY down after we had people come into the shop and ask why 5CS was so ‘staticy’ in town. So I took a drive out to Huddleston (middle of nowhere) and it was gone, they are running off a rinky dink standby antenna on a roughly eighty foot mast. The main mast was around 80m or about 250 feet.

    This is some video of the takedown. < href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGgedYb5Uu0&quot;

    As you can see, it remains completely intact until impact, the top third of it pretty much disentegrated, the bottom two thirds is (mostly) intact. The small mast visible in the video is the standby antenna.

    New one supposed to be going up in a month or so. I'll put some pics up if I can.

    Geoff
    VK5GDR

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