Boulder Dam Bypass tower and cableway collapse

The main cableway constructed in order to build the bridge across the canyon 890 feet above the Colorado river completely collapsed on Friday the 14th of september 2006, due to high winds gusting near or over 100 MPH.

These towers were massive at 280 feet tall. Here is a picture taken before the collapse:

There are four of these towers that held the cableways that were composed of multiple 3" diameter steel cables, and smaller ones as well.
In the pictures below you can see the whole cableway, plus you can see the trolleys that were in the middle of the span.

Nobody has come up with a definite answer as to why the towers collapsed, but what makes sense to me is one of the guy wires snapped or came loose holding one of the towers. If one came loose the whole structure would come down like it did.

The cables came down and crushed vehicles on the Nevada side.

Also the cables crushed part of one construction trailer. There were men inside of the trailer next to it at the time.

No one was injured which was a small miracle in itself, as there was vehicle traffic at the time when the cables fell across the highway.
The dam was closed over the weekend as workers cleared the cables from the highway.

The 3" cables are now twisted and it is now a problem how they are going to cut them loose. The construction is now expected to be delayed 18 months. The now collapsed cableway took one year to build, and now a new one will need to be built, as well as time needed to remove the collapsed one, once they figure out how to remove it.

According to one dam employee i talked to, there is also they question if construction will even continue at all at this point without more funding etc.. Who knows what the contractors are going through, and if the existing contracts may be cancelled at this time, and if they have to start from scratch with new contractors and crews. This was a much bigger tragedy than i imagined until i went out to look for myself on 09-24-06, all we could think was WOW! this is a BIG setback. The dam police force were all wondering if they would even have jobs when the bypass was complete, i guess now they can figure on at least couple more years of job security than what they thought.

Most of the pictures below are small size, click on the pictures for full resolution, the large versions are all around 900K to download.

Here is the Nevada side tower collapse as viewed from the highway, you can see how close all of this is. Don't ask how the picture was taken from the bike while traveling.

Here is some of the rigging that fell with the cables, the green piece of equipment is about 20 feet long.

Here is one of the crumpled towers on the Nevada side:

This pic shows the cables hanging from the support pillars on the Nevada side. This is the problem they are pondering is how to get them down.

Next, is the Arizona side pics

This shows the base of the arch cut in the canyon wall on the Arizona side. This has nothing to do with the collapse, just interesting:

Last is a close up of the trolley equipment now stranded midspan about 300 feet from the river.

I hope you enjoyed reading this story, as i am right here in Boulder City to report on it.