Saturday, May 18, 2024

Two Cranes and some High Tension Towers Blown over During Houston Storm

(Satellite, the are rebuilding the land south of Wingate Street.)

The yellow crane crushed the cab of a ready-mix truck and killed the driver. My sister-in-law had trouble getting back home during this storm because of a tree laying on a road.
khou

You can tell by the tension in the cables that the luffing jib was high in the air. The crane manufacturers specify limits on wind speeds for operating. This storm must have sprung up from nowhere that they were not at least in the process of knifing down the luffing jib.
khou

In fact, they didn't even bother to quit working and weathervane the cranes. Note that the yellow crane is facing south, but the wind was obviously coming from the west. I can't tell if they are doing a jump-form pour or a slip-form pour. If it is the later, one doesn't want to stop the pour. But I don't think the lattice cranes would have been part of the pour, so they could have at least stopped working and put them in weathervane mode. At any rate, the pour is stopped now.
khou

When the helicopter went over downtown and some homes, I didn't see any downed trees or missing roofs. The grid should have enough redundancy to tolerate one destroyed tower. But if there are more of these transmission lines out of service, that not only could cause widespread outages, it could take a while to repair.
khou

This was an adjacent tower. It looks like this one might have fallen into the wires of the parallel lines and taken those lines out of service as well.
khou

And a third tower in a row was down.  This is the fourth tower that was down, and this would have draped wires over the expressway. Evidently, the wires on the expressway have already been removed.
khou

The big arena downtown looked OK, but this building lost more than its roof.

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