Jim,
In June 1998 an F3 came within 100 yards of one our telecommunications towers
in Binghamton, NY. Upstate about 4 hours from you. The tornado was on the
ground as it passed our site and cut a 150' wide swath. It went right over a
350' self supporting AM directional tower (around 15' at the base) and
twisted it off it's concrete foundation and felled it in a straight line
towards the center of the swath. The tornado went over one of the anchor
points of a 783' guyed tower (7' face) and collapsed the secondary TV array
into the tower at 750' and twisted one bay of a 4 bay FM array at 500'. The
tower and top mounted array was untouched. It continued on the ground,
passed right where we are now in the process of putting a new 1150' tower,
and hit a 600' guyed 5' face tower head on. It took it straight out 600' on
the ground and luckily the two people in the TV studio directly beneath it
we're not hurt. It collapsed three or four large satcom dishes and picked up
a dumpster and "moved" it 3/4 of a mile. The hill was without power for
almost 7 days. Our tower is a small 170' Rohn 55G that we had just refitted
with three star mounts to remove the lateral sway for it is heavily loaded
with landmobile/paging arrays/lines. It was untouched but it wasn't all due
to the guying for none of the arrays were touched, including five 1 meter
dishes on the building. We were lucky. When you're number is up, it's up.
Gordon N6IN/2
GRI Telecom, Inc. / T&K Communications Systems, Inc.
In a message dated 08/09/1999 12:16:30 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
jccrtv@jccrtv.com writes:
> At about 8:30 Sunday morning an F2 strength tornado came through the North
> Fork of Long Island. The NWS says it was 300 feet wide and touched down 3
> times over a 3 mile stretch, the closest a half mile from my home. Weather
> radio didn't go off cause the cleaning lady had unplugged it to plug in her
> vacuum, and over the week the battery took over and drained (!!!!).
> Squirrels had made their home directly above our bedroom in the attic so it
> was their noise that woke me up at 8:30 and sent me outside in my robe to
> try and see where they were getting in. The sky became very dark almost
> immediately and all I can describe is an eerie calm. I just had a funny
> feeling and immediately lowered the tower. Fortunately no one was hurt
> although it picked many boats out of the marina and launched one of them 3
> blocks, tore off a few roofs and the rest was all over water. If it came
> through a little closer I guess my lowering the tower wouldn't have done
> much good, but I figured it might be a thunderstorm. Many of you described
> how you made disconnects for all cables and over the past week I finally
> made them. Under this "field test" expecting a thunderstorm any second and
> in the rain in my robe, I had all cables disconnected and grounded in
> seconds, and the tower lowered in under a minute. A very weird morning. Has
> anyone on the reflector had a tower lifted from a tornado? How far away did
> it go?
>
> Jim Mulvey
> KS1A
> Cutchogue, Long Island
>
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