A Tower Struck Down

June 19, 2024 9:02 PM

Somebody is having a very bad day! Fortunately, gelato has been saved.

Come for the picture of an infrastructure surprise, stay for the heartwarming gelato paragraphs.
Transpower are working on it.
Meanwhile, have some appropriate music.

I'm being flippant but I am in the region affected by this; all is well here. Remember to check in on your neighbours!

posted by inexorably_forward (13 comments total)

I didn't realise that the first comment would be... me, reporting that I have power! Apparently I'm among the lucky several thousand.

Go infrastructure workers!
posted by inexorably_forward at 10:08 PM on June 19 [3 favorites]

My first thought at seeing the pic of the fallen tower was: Surely they can still use the lines on the left, now top, side of the tower; they're not touching the ground. :D
posted by gible at 10:21 PM on June 19 [1 favorite]

I'm sure it's happens somewhere what, but I've never heard of a pylon just... Falling over. Will be very curious about the results of the investigation.
posted by Ickster at 10:52 PM on June 19

Or perhaps…

https://youtu.be/Q8P_xTBpAcY?si=dZUb0FAIEGGWY29b
posted by aldus_manutius at 11:19 PM on June 19

Redditors are saying that bolts were undone for sandblasting, but it's not clear to me where that info comes from.

I too look forward to the results of the investigation.
posted by inexorably_forward at 11:37 PM on June 19

Yes it just looks like someone undid the bolts (the flanges are obviously intact) - and TV news said that maintenance of some sort was happening. Someone screwed up big time
posted by mbo at 12:20 AM on June 20

Yeah, that's gonna take more than a box of beers to make it right.
posted by inexorably_forward at 12:52 AM on June 20

My guess is that they normally undo the bolts at 1 corner while they sandblast then do it up again, to speed things up someone started undoing the next set and that worked great for months until they came to that one pylon with just a little too much sideways tension on it
posted by mbo at 1:51 AM on June 20 [2 favorites]

It sounds like doing maintenance on both avenues of power delivery at the same time was maybe excessively optimistic as well….
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:47 AM on June 20 [1 favorite]

With the gelato reference this post gave me huge tummy butterflies. Torre Garisenda in Bologna might be on the verge of collapse and there is a big project to fix the thing. It is the smaller of the two towers in the center of the city. It's an incredibly dense, busy section of the old city, it's failure would be very sad historically and likely a tragedy, there's heavy foot traffic feet away.
posted by sammyo at 4:34 AM on June 20

My neighborhood in Dallas lost power three times after recent storms: once for about 30 hours and twice several days later for about 6 hours for repairs (tree on the line, problem with the transformer). We're on a direct line from the transformer to a police substation, so we get ours back first usually. So anybody with power out right now has my heartfelt sympathies. It suuuuuucks.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 6:42 AM on June 20

The mention of gelato and a fallen tower, combined with the fact that my kids are currently on a school trip to Europe and we made lots of Olivia goes to Venice jokes before they left, made my first thought "Oh, no - did my kids actually destroy the Piazza San Marco?
posted by nickmark at 8:27 AM on June 20 [1 favorite]

ha! called it - they'd removed all the nuts on 3 legs which was against protocol
posted by mbo at 7:25 PM on June 23