Can an earthquake take out tower lights?

[4CX1000A]

I noticed about five o'clock this morning that a top beacon was out on the WBZ-TV tower in Needham, and all of the top beacons seemed to be out on the FM128 tower. I've never seen top beacons out on two towers at once, and wonder if yesterday's earthquake had something to do with it.

 

[RogerWilco]

I would imagine an earthquake could knock a light out.

 

[MR. JAROME_CALVIN]

It knocked off Phone Service in my area (Salem, Ma) for almost an hour

 

[aaronread]

Well, for what it's worth...at my two-story house in East Providence, I clearly felt the house shake (and heard lots of things rattling) up on the second floor. But my wife felt nothing on the first floor. That's a difference of maybe 12ft?

I would imagine that the tops of thousand-foot tall towers had that effect somewhat magnified. Probably not dissimilar to how the tower deal with a certain amount of wind at the base, but it's usually a LOT windier at the top.

So yeah, I could totally see tower beacons being shaken hard enough to damage a filament. I wonder if LED lights would be inherently more resistant to that sort of thing? And if the beacons were damaged, I wonder what happened to the antennas!

 

[DanStrassberg]

I wonder if LED lights would be inherently more resistant to that sort of thing? And if the beacons were damaged, I wonder what happened to the antennas!

If you think about how LED lamps are constructed, they would seem to be much more immune than incandescents to damage from vibration. A slender filament--particularly a coiled filament--would appear to be quite vulnerable to vibration and might even be resonant at the sub-audio frequencies that I suspect are typical of earthquakes. Semiconductor chips, such as LEDs, must have much higher self-resonant frequencies. However, chips are more brittle than slender wires. So special mounting technology might be necessary to safeguard them from low-frequency vibration.