To K2JAS as to why people care whether the 2000' tower fell in a 70'
circle or a 700' circle...
1. It's astounding to some of us that a huge tower like that would all
fall within such a small circle, 70'. 700' seems intuitively to be more
likely, but apparently was not the case.
2. As in the example of the broadcast engineer who experienced his
station going off the air and a couple seconds later had tower sections
falling through the roof of his transmitter building...we want to avoid
that kind of situation. I have a 160' tower, for instance, 30' or so
away from my bedroom. Many people have towers attached to the back of
their house...of course they tend to be modest height towers. Otherwise,
this would be a worse situation...if the tower ever collapsed they'd have
a lot of metal in the house. Still, none of us want to ever experience a
bunch of tower sections coming through the roof of our house...certainly for
those who have room, having
the tower a little further from the house seems to make some sense.
3. As discussed in other messages, various counties/cities, etc. have
various setbacks, the logic of which are generally safety margin so that
your tower won't fall on your neighbor's house or property. Apparently
towers rarely fall over like a tree being cut by a lumberjack,
"Timber-r-r-r-r!" but this is the scenario local government officials
seem to envision. Perhaps some use this scenario as an excuse to limit
tower heights and discourage big towers, even if they know better.
In reality, towers seem much more likely to collapse almost straight
downward into a big pile of bent and crumpled metal near the tower base.
73 - Rich Boyd, KE3Q
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