TIME FROM OUR
others as well. He was asked to resign from his position on the ACCT board of directors. (He didn’t, and was reelect - ed a few years later.) The immediate assumption was that ERi had been irresponsible, and the industry wanted to disassociate itself from the incident. “I’m a professional vendor member, and I was following the standards,” Domeck said. “And so it should have been an eye-opening sign to everyone to go, ‘Oh, my gosh, something’s wrong with the standards.’ But it wasn’t. It was the opposite. It was, ‘They did something wrong.’ Their mentality was, ‘It can’t happen to us, we’re smarter and better than other people.’” Domeck said that, as far as ERi knew, it had been doing things correctly. It had used seven-foot triple helix anchors with a seven-foot extension, which were rated for a load of more than 30,000 pounds. “In the worst possible soil condition, it should have held,” said Domeck. Except that the soil condition was worse than almost anyone could have imag - ined, and worse than anything on the
manufacturer’s holding capacity chart for the helical anchors.
TO LEARN
The site was built on Pahala ash, the fallout from a long-ago volcanic eruption. This area on the big island of Hawaii is the only place on Earth where it occurs, not much was known about its properties at the time, and it appeared identical to the red dirt common to the area. What scientists and engineers were learning is that Pahala ash has extremely low cohesion compared to other soils, and it gets even lower when saturated—holding as much as 400 percent soil moisture, and when disturbed, its strength may be so low as to be negligible. Despite ERi’s adherence to the ACCT standard in place at the time, these factors allowed the anchors to rip out of the ground. The scene from 2011 after guy anchors pulled from the ground, causing the tower to collapse while ERi’s Teddy Cal- loway was testing the zip line connect- ed to the tower. He died from the fall.
MISTAKES
focused on taking care of Curt, who had been a longtime friend, and his recovery.” ERi and several government agencies investigated the incident to discover how and why it happened. Over the course of a few months, they brought in structural engineers, geotechnical engi - neers, and an ACCT PVM to understand the incident.
SNAP JUDGMENTS
The backlash that Domeck anticipated happened long before the investiga - tions were completed. “It came faster than I could get to Hilo,” he said. He was called a murderer by the ACCT execu - tive director at the time, and by a few
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