From Geekosystem: [This is a must watch video / safe for work]
On Wednesday, thousands of Springfield, Ohio residents were left without power when a 275-foot smokestack being demolished fell the wrong way, knocking down two 12,500 volt power lines and crushing “several pieces of power equipment,” including a building that stored backup generators.
According to the demolition company that handled the work at the former Ohio Edison Mad River Power Plant (not a nuclear power plant –Ed.), the explosives detonated correctly, “but an undetected crack on the south side of the tower pulled it in a different direction. ‘Nobody’s happy with things that go wrong in life, and sometimes it’s out of our hands and beyond anybody’s prediction. … We’re all extremely thankful no one was injured,’ Kelly told The Columbus Dispatch.”
Watch the video below:
I can think of many metaphors for what this wayward tower represents: politics, the economy, and climate change come to mind. Anyone think of some specific metaphors…?
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[snip…]
Nobody’s happy with things that go wrong in life, and sometimes it’s out of our hands and beyond anybody’s prediction. …
“I can’t be blamed.”
Atlas Shrugged, anyone?
David Ball November 12, 2010 at 8:22 pm “If only Greenpeace had been trying to hang a banner”
But look at this way… He brought down “the fossil-fueled grid” in the process. They would probably martyr the dead spider-man.
Anyway, I blame the undetected crack on the undetected temperature rise, which caused the metal to undetectedly expand and crack in the first place. Then along came the undetected tidal wave caused by the undetected sea-level rise, to knock it over.
Fairly obvious, I’d say 🙂
Oh sure, you’ve got your crack theories and your failed charges and your incompetent contractors.
It was obviously a missile!
Id assume those power lines wouldnt have power for the short time of the blast for safety reasons….though that flash seems to say there was power in those lines….if their was..there was safety failures all over that site even before that tower fell the wrong way.
It must have been a Tea Party demolition crew.
They crushed everything on the left.
They are calling it a “tower”. I think it’s pretty obvious that it’s a smokestack. Or is “smokestack” now not politically correct for some reason?
There were four separate detonations, the first two fairly close together which did not appear to have much effect, then a third, which destabilised the chimney – it dropped almost vertically by several feet. It could have fallen in any direction. The fourth explosion occurred after the chimney had come down. I would hazard a guess that the demolition gang had used defective equipment (damp fuses?). For that reason alone, if true, the conclusion has to be incompetence on their part.
An analogy? The IPCC, hopefully.
Total incompetence. Just look at the lack of proper hazard identification. People (including kids) standing under power lines which would obviously be a problem if the tower fell the wrong way.
Good safety is good business and is a prerequisite for demonstrating competence.
@ur momisugly http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/12/undetected-crack-causes-unpredictable-results/#comment-528759
[snip], that is not funny.
[REPLY – Agreed. ~ E.]
[Ryan – gone, cleaning up the comments now]
I love it. The little girl notices something isn’t quite right, steps to the left to verify what she is seeing, and then hauls arse… shouting over her shoulder “run.” Meanwhile the two adults on the right just step back and need the prodding of the little girl’s statement to spur them into action. Big sis, or mom (dunno which) looks around to see where everybody went and then figures that maybe running would be a good idea… seeing as things are going bad quite fast and everybody else has figured that out.
Fred Dibnah How to bring down a chimney stack.
Translation
“There’s no way it can fall the wrong way, you know. I mean, the bricks are really good, and we’ve eliminated this half of it, so it’s got to go that bloody way, one way or another, you know. Either,… Ideally we want it to go, you know, towards that new brickwork over there, and that’s the way we’ve cut it to go, but square uns (ones) are awkward, and they always want to fall, like, “square-ways”, you know, so we’ll just
have to see what happens, you know. It either,… it’ll either come dead square or it’ll go over there – one of the two. I’m, what? 80% confident it’ll go over there, but the other, it could, you know, go straight, but it’s gotta come this way.
We once did one, and we’d engineered it so the Borough Engineer had to light the fire and,… we wouldn’t have done it on this day, if he hadn’t been coming, and it were blowing a force ten bloody gale towards it, you see, and everything went wrong. It were blowing that hard, that the fire sent fire to the field next door. And it was blowing so hard it didn’t even draw (the smoke up the chimney): all the sticks burned away and it stayed up, and it were rocking, going three foot out of plumb, and coming back.
Now, if anybody’d said that to me, I’d’ve said “I don’t believe you – it’s impossible – something that big could get three foot out of plumb and comeback. No way!” But it’s as true as I bloody stand here, it were going three foot out of plumb and coming back. And in the end, we had to put a jack in the back and jack it up, you know, and it went over – eventually. “
Global warming is surely to blame and this was its tipping point. 🙂
They should have hired Fred Dibnah,
A perfect demonstration of Sod’s Law at work.
“CNN discovers a new danger of Global Warming.”
“But the computer model said it would go THAT way!”
Not metaphors, I know, but…
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, for promis’d joy!
Reminds me of the CAGW scam. The elitist think-tank behind this probably still can’t understand how it has become such a divisive issue after the billions spent on pseudo-science and MSM propaganda. The harder climate scientist preach their fire and brimstone, the more antagonistic the public becomes.
They must find it totally confounding that the strategy designed to get the peoples of the world to join together under an unelected world government has fallen the wrong way!
Update: Since no one was injured, the State of Ohio will not investigate . — if a tree falls…
Ryan Maue – Sounds like the Climategate investigations 😛
There is the very similar case involving a piece of buttered toast which slipped of the plate and landed on the floor butter side up. Whilst this was initially thought to be a miracle, a subsecuent papal investigation resulted in the conclusion that the toast had been buttered on the wrong side.
There is always a simple explanation if one looks.
You can always do it the old fashioned way.
If the link does not work, search Youtube.com using:
“Fred Dibnah How to bring down a chimney stack”
The late great Fred Dibnah a great British icon.
Some may find the Bolton accent a bit difficult.
The explosives are getting unreliable due to the rising CO2.
Dang
I see that Sleepalot has beaten me to it and kindly given a translation.
In all probability the first boom-boom is the detonating cord going off, which lights the delays that are in the explosives (there is a delay in the cord harness). The second two booms are the actual charges going off. The third report, with a flash, is a standby generator building being hit, seen in the video from another angle shown below (first part of the video is what you see above).
The stack sits down and to the right because the back fails, possibly from a crack, but, if so, the crack was more likely in one of the hinges as that is where the high stresses concentrate. Once the hinge fails the front notch holds the stack and it falls towards the back because the front has shifted out from under the center of gravity. The back can also fail if then notch is taken too deep, but that is not likely with a reinforced concrete stack, or if the breech is not properly allowed for.
AP video
I just noticed that the breech is visible in the second video and it is quite high, so that is definitely not associated with the failure.