At 10:15 PM 12/29/2005, Jason Creager wrote:
>My "Spidey sense" is now through the roof after seeing that website.
>
> > This installation demonstrates using a existing tower as one of the guy
> > anchors and guying part way up the existing tower. Not a good idea.
>
>It demonstrates a PLETHORA of bad ideas!!!!!!! Damn, if I had been part of
>that "crew", I would have left as soon as I realized how badly things were
>being handled.
>
>When those towers fail (Tornado Alley, you know), there's no way in hell I
>would EVER want my name to be associated with that installation. If anyone is
>injured or killed, every single person responsible for the installation will
>be named in the lawsuit. Sure, as a "gopher", you may not end up being
>finanically responsible for any of the damage, but you will sure as hell be
>named in the lawsuit and will sure as hell have to hire an attorney to fix it
>for you.
>
>Here are the mistakes as I see them:
>1. Guying to another tower. (BIGGIE)
Oddly, this isn't inherently a bad idea (unlike some of the assembly
practices you talk about below, which are). Anything can be adequately
engineered, and that includes all manner of odd configurations of tension
and compression members. If you look at Snelson's tensegrity tower, at
first glance you'd think that will never survive, but it has done so and
will continue to do so. It's also got a fair amount of engineering analysis
in it.
>2. Using a "Pelvis Breaker" climbing belt as fall protection.
>
>3. Using "climbing gear" as fall protection (nit picky, yes, but still
>inappropriate. Much better than the "Kill You" belt above, though.)
>
>4. Using static, non-shock arresting, non-decellerating lanyards as fall
>protection. (Life or death mistake.)
>
>5. Using "TLAR" as a design guide since I didn't see any mention of tension
>measuring devices for the guys. ("That Looks About Right" KILLS PEOPLE.)
Jason, you're expressing good ideas a bit forcefully here. Ultimately,
whoever does the work makes the call about what they think is the level of
safety expected. There's a big difference in occupational safety and hobby
safety, largely because of the reduced exposure in the latter (relatively
few people get killed climbing ham towers, even with an amazing array of
really inappropriate equipment).
There's a world of difference between your boss saying, go up and fix that
darn light or you're fired, and a ham deciding to climb (or not climb) a
tower. The boss holds a big club, and OSHA stands there to make sure that
he's not being unreasonable with respect to safety.
Sure, using non-shock-absorbing stuff is less safe (higher injury
potential) than using the right thing, but it's a call a person can
make. If the odds of falling off (and needing the fall arrest) are 1/1000,
and you climb that tower once every 5 years, the odds of your dying in the
next 50 years are pretty low. On the other hand, if you climb a tower 4
times a day, you'd better invest in that good hardware. You can make the
informed decision that the small increase in risk of death climbing the
tower once isn't worth the dollar investment.
There are also situations where one might willingly take on risk for some
other reason. Mountain climbing is a good example. For many, many years,
the state of the art in attaching the rope to your body was the "swami
belt", a length of nylon webbing about 20 ft long wrapped around your waist
and tied. Yep, people died from it, but many, many, many other climbers
didn't. The vast majority of falls in rock climbing are not "free fall to
end of rope" events. They're more like "oops, I can't stick the hold, and
slide down the face 5-10 ft," and for that the "tie the rope around your
waist" approach, while uncomfortable, works just fine.
In most low angle rock climbing situations (say, 5.9 and below), falls may
be common, but free falls are not. A bigger concern is the protection
pulling out from the rock (the aptly named "zippering out"). When you get
to serious aid climbing (where you hang in the harness), you need a decent
harness, but again, the maximum fall tends to be shorter. Top roped or
yo-yo'd sport climbing tends also to have short falls (assuming your
belayer is doing a good job). If you're free solo climbing, it really
doesn't make much difference. Every slip could be your last.
However, I think your point is valid when comparing rock climbing gear with
tower climbing. They're both climbing, but not really the same. On a
tower, if you fall, it's MUCH more likely to be a free fall to the end of
the rope. So, while fall frequency might be higher in rock climbing (in a
falls/hour sense), average fall severity is much lower.
>6. While I can't confirm this, it's safe to assume that the guy hardware
>(cable, turnbuckles, shackles, etc.) is probably cheap stuff from the
>hardware
>store instead of load rated, American (therefore, if it fails, traceable back
>to the ore mine) hardware like from The Crosby Group. Why do I assume
>this? He
>chose to "save money" rather than "do it right", so I can't imagine that he
>didn't pinch pennies here.
Again, it's all a matter of design, and risk acceptance posture. If I
build a 200 ft tower out in the middle of the back 40, and it falls down,
it's only money, and might even be educational. If I build the same tower
in the back of my 50x100 ft suburban lot, and it lands on my neighbor's
back yard, it's a whole different story.
I'd venture to guess that the house you live in wasn't assembled with
traceable structural fasteners (nails), yet you choose to live there,
because the designs are specifically made to accomodate the highly variable
nature of nailed joints.
By the way, American manufacture doesn't imply traceability to ore. Plenty
of US companies make utter dreck, and plenty of foreign companies make very
fine equipment. The traceability and quality standards in Europe are at
least as rigorous as in the US, if not more so, and somehow, I doubt that
they're all importing US goods for their rigging needs.
>7. THE WORST MISTAKE OF THE ENTIRE INSTALLATION:
>
>"The good news is, the base IS setting flat when the tower is vertical
>(phew).
>You can see how I have approached the mounting - the towers set on a single
>bolt"
>
>and
>
>"If you take a look at the bases, rather than spend $125 each plus
>shipping on
>two flat bases from Rohn, I had my excellent local welder Robert weld 3/8"
>flat plates to the bottoms of two tower sections, drill holes in the centers,
>and strengthen the joint with stout webbing. This saved about $200."
>
>Here's the problem: N5OT is not a structural engineer. He CANNOT MAKE THAT
>DECISION.
He most certainly CAN make that decision. He just has to accept the
consequences of the decision, which might be premature failure (or
not). This is a hobby, not an occupation. He (and his friends who climb
on the towers) get to choose whether they trust his judgement.
>He is not what OSHA would define as a "competent person" in that area,
>(one who could make the decision about whether or not the homemade base
>plates were structurally sound). (Does OSHA apply here? No. Do the same
>standards exist in civil law? Yes.)
I wouldn't want to get into splitting legal hairs here (IANAL, after all),
but there's a long tradition of "reasonable man" in civil law. If N5OT
claimed it was engineered and deceived the tower climbers, there's
definitely a problem. If, on the other hand, N5OT explains what he did and
the climbers are confident, they've accepted whatever risk there is (mind
you, all the insurance companies and heirs will claim otherwise, at least
at first). It's really more a matter of informed consent.
>For example, I am a "competent person" to inspect my fall protection
>harness on a daily basis for wear and tear. However, I am NOT a "competent
>person" in regards to the required ANNUAL inspection of the harness
>because I have not received (nor do I want) that specific training.
What's to say that N5OT, or any other ham, couldn't have had sufficient
engineering expertise to do it properly? Sure, having that P.E. license
hanging on the wall says that the state of California thinks I know about
electricity, but I know plenty of unlicensed people who have equal or
better skills. And, unlike them, I can legally sell my services as
qualified, but that's more a matter of estabilishing legal responsibility
and trade protection.
>N5OT admitted on his webpage that he used homemade equipment to save money.
>
>Do you know what kind of field day the lawyers would have with that?
Hmm.. kind of depends on how competent N5OT is with making
equipment. There's no inherent reason why he can't make equipment that is
equal to or better than commercially available equipment. Ham radio is all
about this. We used to fabricate all kinds of one-of-a-kind lifting
equipment, for which analysis was impractical. So we'd proof test at 3
times the expected max loads.
There's a long and time-honored tradition of fabricating your own gear in
safety critical situations. Most of the (rock) climbing gear companies got
started by some guy in a garage shop making a useful product.
As far as lawyers and field days, it's well established that you can sue
anyone for anything, you just might not win. They tend to make a rational
business decision.. is the amount we'll collect worth the effort we'll put
out to win. Frankly, I think there's a lot of lawsuit paranoia out there
(oh my gosh, we'd better do this because we might get sued, even though
there's relatively few actual cases of lawsuits collecting) fed by folks
who profit from the uncertainty. Selling warning signs is a big business.
In a business, you make decisions based on the probabilities, and you might
decide to spend the money on placards rather than saving money on defending
a speculative future lawsuit. Or, more to the point, your insurance company
might make that decision for you. Either way, you're trading off a risk to
your business assets against current expenditures. (You could forego the
placards and pay higher insurance rates, for instance)
However, as a private person, you can engage in an entirely different sort
of decision making process. Private people tend to have less assets to sue
for, for instance. Private people tend not to have "business imperatives"
pushing for short term return over long term risk. The latter is why OSHA
came into being. In business, because things tend to get reduced to
dollars and cents, you could make the analysis along the lines of: We don't
need to spend money on that safety gear. At worst, we'll lose 1 out of a
100 workers every year, and paying off their heirs will only cost $100K,
and that's a lot less than the $500K it will take for the safety railings,
especially if we get lucky, and nobody dies this year. And if we get fined,
it's just a cost of doing business and we'll be able to deduct it on our taxes.
Private persons tend not to make safety decisions on such cold hearted
actuarial analysis.
Private persons DO tend to make poor evaluations of risk particularly for
unlikely events(people worry much more about nuclear reactors exploding
than dams failing, but the latter is actually more likely).
>Anyone who makes that kind of decision, good intentioned or not, is
>deciding to bypass all of the engineering specs of the manufacturer and
>certified engineers. That's a get out of jail free card to Rohn for any
>failure and a quite possibly get INTO jail card for him.
I don't know that I'd use the word bypass. It's just an alternative
approach. As for getoutofjail for Rohn, well, they're out of business
anyway. It's the cost of defending the lawsuit that runs up the tab, and
they'd get sued regardless of the merits. For him to go to jail would
require a fairly horrible case of criminal negligence.
>So, say goodbye to everything that you own that isn't homesteaded,
>anything more than one car, and half of all of your future earnings.
>That's IF you are lucky enough to still be a free man because you were not
>found CRIMINALLY NEGLIGENT.
IANAL, but I think it would be very difficult to show criminal intent
here. If you make counterfeit cable clamps, that would be criminal
intent. If N5OT were an employer, and told the employees that it was
safe, knowing that it wasn't (or without due diligence to establish that it
was), that might be criminal intent.
>Of course, so is using another tower as a guy point.
You're making an assertion that using N5OT's use of a tower as a guy point
is criminally negligent. You make this assertion without any real
knowledge of any analysis that has been done, and without yourself being
qualified to make the assertion. I know you feel strongly, Jason, but you
are basically accusing N5OT of a crime, and that's a pretty strong
statement (as in probably defamatory and libelous).
A better way to say it is that the engineering analysis of using a second
tower as a guy point is something that's not in the manufacturer's
datasheets, and that it would be easy for such a configuration to be unsafe.
>Even worse is knowing that your entire life is in ruins and someone else's
>life is altered or ENDED because YOU wanted to save a couple hundred
>bucks. Try sleeping at night after that.
Well, sure... but you and everybody else make decisions like that every
day. You make a decision to drive to work and back, and you accept the
1:5000 risk of dying in a year of doing it (and possibly taking some
innocent person with you when you do crash). This is not to say that life
is not without value; it most certainly is. It's that we make decisions
everyday to save some some of money trading that off against our life and
health or someone elses. On a larger scale, we pay taxes at some level
that results in more or less people dying from lack of health care or food.
>God forbid anything should happen like that, but it CAN and DOES happen.
>If someone is injured, the fallout is not pretty. God bless Mark for
>working with kids and all, but that won't help him in court.
>
>Jason
>KC0ERG
Jim Lux, W6RMK
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