Tower crew brings down an unsafe-to-climb 200-foot radio tower. This was a planned project and done intentionally. And yes, they really are called GUY wires. en.wikipedia.o...
It's a rule on RU-vid that any video depicting something being destroyed, no matter how rotten, dilapidated, or dangerous, will have a comments section full of people whining about how it should have been sold/given to them.
Have seen one of these come down unintentionally during a storm, extremely high winds during severe storm no damage done except to tower itself. Was suspected a small tornado.
Very funny. However, a 200' tower wouldn't reliably reach a range much further than 35-50 miles. The station likely replaced this tower with a much taller one to reach a larger audience.
For the people complaining about how much of a waste this was and how somebody could have come in and taken it down properly, by the time you paid for enough liability insurance to make the property owner's lawyer happy and spent the time and energy needed to take this down properly, you would more than likely have more invested in this old tower before you even got it to your house than it would have cost to buy the tower sections brand new.
+bayouratt283 someone with some sense, thank you!! it's impossible to tell in the video the condition of this old tower, it's unlikely it was worth saving, by the comment he made about just a small amount of damage to the building , they may have planned on replacing it anyway
That's not true for a tower of this height. That tower cost $4k new. Removal by a bonded contractor would be about half of that. So this was indeed the wasteful option.
Guy wires are used to keep the tower straight vertical and to give it structural support. If you notice the tower is very thin and towers like these are not designed to be able to stand up straight without help. Guy wires pull down on the tower at specific locations to keep equal downward pressure across all sections of the tower. This makes it very, very strong and able to hold antennas and climbers and stand against strong winds.
Watching the guy try to turn those old corroded turnbuckles without tools and without gloves convinced me the crew were in over their heads. Very lucky no one was hurt.
+Tyler D. what you would use wire cutters? I'd go with the bolties that's thick cable not wire. The guys being in over their heads because he's using his hands. I wouldn't say nor support that argument.
It did come on to me as a bit strange, like some people were passing by, saying to eachother: I know what we should do today, let's bring down the first radio tower we see!
This is the old KPAY tower system in Chico California. KHSL-AM was on 1290 using this two tower array and then they moved 1290 to the KPAY-AM 1060 array. 1060 went dark and 1290 was moved to the 1060 towers. Basically this is located at Bruce Road and Remington in Chico California...or rather was located.
I did tower work 36D20 in the Army and we deactivated a lot of towers in the old Granger line on Okinawa, not Ron25s. We cut the guys from the inside out to the head guy and the towers always fell in a nice straight line but they were built a bit sturdier than a -25. But still a good drop.
No engineer on earth can bring down a tower by cutting the guys and not have it be destroyed. If someone wants to save an erect tower, it's dismantled by a climbing crew and lowered by crane or gin pole. Cutting a guy is done when the tower needs to be brought down cheaply and quickly.
im not sure what prompted me to want to look up falling towers. im fascinated by tall radio towers and i just got the idea of wanting to see one fall just because they're so interesting, a feat of human engineering, they're so hypnotically tall. :D every time i see one of these tall radio towers on the road, i stare at it as we're driving past.
If your interested in radio towers and TV towers you definitely need to watch the movie fall. Two girls climb a abandoned TV tower that is 2000 feet tall called the b67 TV tower and the ladder falls so they get styck up there
They know where cable goes when cut, and if you are outside the possible whip zone it simply CANNOT reach the worker. If you are inside the whip zone you're incompetent. They weren't.
There was a radio station in Florence, SC that had their tower mysteriously taken down by this method in wee hours of the morning one night. They never did find out who did it. The station was in financial trouble and the suspicion was that the owner did it or had somebody do it to collect on the insurance. It couldn't ever be proven, though. This was before everybody and his brother and kid sister had cameras set up everywhere.
@@SerenityMae11 Uh, I was born and raised in "that part pf the world" and still live here. Your prejudice and intolerance are showing. You might want to tuck that back in.
Many years ago worker did this to an old WSLG AM radio tower. They cleared everything from the projected path. The old transmitter building, the workers pickup truck and the highway were the only things in the opposite direction. They cut the support wires and managed to hit all three. 😢
The right ammount of thermite would slice through those cables like butter. [Note to DHS: I am not advocating, nor planning to use the right ammount of thermite to slice through those or any other antenna guy wires like butter; it's merely an observation.]
Wow, that looked so professional. Got a guy cutting metal tension wires with out safetly goggles or gloves. I was waiting for this to become a faces of death video
Cut the single steel anchor that goes into the ground, not the individual wires. Doing so can make remaining guy wires, including those near the guy cutting, snap up high and come whipping back at you . Cut the single anchor point that goes into the concrete is much simpler and faster. Angle grinder/cutoff wheel
We used to "un-stack" radio towers that were in good shape all the time until we took an Allied tower down in Alice Tx. As we started digging up the anchors, 1 had rusted completely through, and we have no idea how it didn't pull out of the ground. After that, no matter what condition, we cut them all down.
My grandpa told my dad a story once of how he had seen a guy get decapitated by similar arresting wires on an aircraft carrier. I don't know how much weight is on those wires, but I wouldn't be just cutting them with bolt cutters.
When toppling an overhead structure plan 2 routes of egress at 90° from each other. Clear all obstructions and debris from the paths and practice disengaging with the tool and evacuating both routes. Be aware of any nearby targets that could be struck and also fall over extending the range of the kill zone.
One could have sold the sections for a minimum of $50.00 each. The guy wiring is virtually scrap, since it was used. eBay values could have exceeded $75.00 per section. Now it's worth what $20/ton?
Steve Weiss It's probably already been stolen. The duggies need copper in the ground to steal so they can buy meth and coke. Some broadcast engineers won't listen, but that's what's wrong with AM Stations with a series feed tower, no ground radials and they are just now understanding how the illegal drug world works.
Steve Weiss looks like an FM site to me, with the evenly spaced antennas at the top (which focus the station's signal at the horizon). A tower can be FM and AM at the same time, but AM towers have an insulator at the base. Most AM stations have more than one tower - as many as twelve!
Engineer be buggered, NO Engineer in his or Her right mind would ever take down a perfectly reusable tower like this Disassemble and sell 10 times the scrap value all I can say is they are bloody idiots. Such a waste
***** I know more than you might think Sir, and destroying a perfectly good tower rather than offer it for sale to Amateur Radio Operators or businesses that may require a tower for their own radio communications or for removal is just stupid. Now I don't know if it was offered for sale and removal or not and literally been left with a clean site. I feel that there would have been someone some place that would have recycled that tower as a tower and not scrap. Info :- When small Local Satellite TV broadcasting came on line where I lived in the 80's the main TV transmitters were in some cases 250 Km away and big TV reception tower's were the norm, but with the advent of the rebroadcasting they were not needed so I purchased many for scrap value and removed them for next to nothing. Thus for the last years of the 80's and into the early 90's I removed tower's like this from sites and sold them to Ham radio Operators and commercial interests way less than they could buy new ones IF they could find a seller and I made good money so just dropping and selling for scrap value, that is a crying waste.
mozzmann Worse, he calls the guy wires "guide wires". Never trust a so-called "engineer" who doesn't know what the pieces he's working on are actually called.
mozzmann This is the litigious world we live in today. It's getting harder and harder to find people that will allow you to take towers like this down the right way unless you have the liability insurance required to do it. They would rather take it down like this in a controlled, albeit destructive, manner and scrap it than risk a multimillion liability lawsuit if the person attempting to take it down is injured or killed in an accident.
+mozzmann You do realize that it's not the engineers that are taking it down right? I mean they are LITERALLY taking it down, but they're just doing a job. The company told them to take it down. Don't call them idiots if they have no choice in the matter.
And they have guys who climb up those things! Those ones on the side of skyscrapers going up also constantly amaze me . . . lifting up all that weight besides being so fragile.
Agee with you on the single point. I have 2 x 95m masts to drop next week and I am planning to use this method. One cut to release all 5 stays at the same time.
If you were doing this kind of work professionally - getting hired by someone to take down a tower (probably of unknown integrity) and you had all that property - you'd probably drop it this way, too. It took him just a short time (couple hours?) to drop it. It would likely take him and a crew more than a day to disassemble it and the labor costs would easily outweigh what the (used) tower sections are worth. Then he'd have to store and market the used sections, probably not his business. Then again, he doesn't seem all *that* professional (no safety glasses etc.) Yeah, he could have saved it...maybe... And yeah, they are GUY wires. Look it up. ;-)
Many times the engineers are only involved enough to say that the new EIA/TIA standard makes this tower too expensive to keep up to code. Engineers seldom suggest how to take a tower dow for fear of perceived liability.
To all the idiots in the comments thinking you're being smart trying to correct the title of this 12 year old video... The wires holding radio/cell towers steady are actually called "Guy Wires" not "Guide Wires" learn about these things before making yourselves look like fools.
Four or five blokes, bolt cutters, shouting, questions, pickup trucks! All to do a job which one man on a bicycle could have done in five minutes on his own with a hacksaw and in complete silence. And without damaging the shack.
