"Steve Bonine" wrote in message
...
Mike Coslo wrote:
Phil Kane wrote:

There was a study made of commercial tower failures several decades
ago that showed this, and I've seen this first hand in some of the
broadcast and comm towers affected by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake
in the San Francisco area.

Whether the local building official is sharp enough to know this is an
exercise left to the applicant....!

The most likely failure scenarios are very true, but there is a
credibility issue in these matters. We can speak of failure modes until
we are blue in the face, but a simple worst case fall radius is easy for
non-
engineering types to understand.

And all the logic in the world won't help if the local building official
insists on using the worst-case scenario or local laws demand it. Frankly,
if I was the local building official, I would use the worst-case scenario.
The primary responsibility of a building inspector is public safety, and
invoking the worst-case scenario seems appropriate in this case.

73, Steve KB9X

No it isn't appropriate. There are telephone poles near my house that if
they were to fall will destroy my house. My neighbors TREES could do the
same. Yet most people do not see these as significant hazards. They are
used to seeing them so do not think of them as hazards.

I lived in one place where a tree next to my garage had a serious case of
heart rot (hollow top to bottom). The tree was all but dead but the owner
would NOT remove it because it was still "alive" (i.e. it had about a dozen
leaves on one branch on one side of the tree). I could not find a way to
force the owner to get rid of the tree. All I could do was to move my car
out of the potential damage area when strong winds came up.

As far as towers go, what is appropriate is that it be required to be
erected per the manufacturer's design guidelines.

Dee, N8UZE