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I had no idea that P.C. Richard was still in business.
Got these photos from a former employee of mine in NYC last night. The lesson here is to make damn sure that you torque the 3/8-16 bolts which hold the head to the pedestal to full-spec. This was Camera 3, which literally fell off of its pedestal in the middle of the 10pm news on WPIX. All told, that's about $80k worth of hardware sitting on the floor:
I know you can get a video grab of the live broadcast. BOOM!
From the 2nd pic though, not sure what's going on there. Did 4 3/8 bolts shear? that seems extremely unlikely.
Sadly, Cam 3 wasn't on the air at that exact moment. It's a robot camera, and was moving to its next programmed shot when it fell off.
The bolts didn't shear. What you're seeing in that pic is that the four bolts (which are captive to the pedestal) have simply unthreaded themselves from the head and fallen back into their "removed" position. They are unharmed. IOW, at some point, someone had removed the head from the pedestal for service, and when they re-installed it, they didn't re-tighten the bolts properly. So, over time, they worked themselves loose.
You hear about this kind of stuff happening, but rarely see it. The sad part is that I know exactly who removed Robot #3 from its pedestal for maintenance, and when, and he's exactly the guy I'd have expected to not use a torque-wrench when re installing.
The overnight EIC re-checked the security of the bolts on the other 5 cameras, and they're all tight.
Photos of #3 (to cam-right of anchor desk) back when it was shiny and new, c. early 2014:
04-12-2017, 08:15 AM
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