Monument Peak Microwave Tower Collapse Captured by HPWREN Cameras and Seismic Sensors
A rapid unscheduled disassembly of a microwave tower on Mount Laguna's Monument Peak on 18 February 2026 was documented by Sudoku Ham of the Open Research Institute. It is a well written and well researched article, describing the author's view of the event, based on information he was able to obtain.
The article is available here.
We only knew about the writeup from after when it was posted, and we then sent additional information and images to them.
We then looked for additional information in our data sets from the two east pointing fixed field of view (color and monochrome) HPWREN cameras, and found two images, one color one mono, of the tower on its way down, as well as the likely signature of the impact time on the ground as seen by an earthquake sensor on UC San Diego's ANZA seismic network, with the seismic station located about 250 meters from the site where the tower was hitting the ground.
The photos are from an experimental Implementation of "once per 10 seconds," camera image acquisitions, which we are testing on a small subset of the cameras. This 10 second image acquisition is in addition to our regular minute-by-minute collection of data. Fortunately. Monument Peak is one of those sites.
Based on the three data sources (color camera pointing east from a location west of the incident, monochrome camera in the same housing as the color one, and the seismic sensor waveforms on all three of its axes) it appears that the timeline for the fall is:
Timeline:
- 09:59:51.5 Color mobo shows tower tilting
- 09:59:52.1 Monochrome mobo shows tower tilting more
- 09:59:54 Seismic signal observed
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The two images show the closeby tower in the process of falling. The images have been post-processed for better viewing, by mostly making change to exposure and contrast.
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Disclaimer: No HPWREN equipment, or the towers it is on, got hurt in the making of this article.