So if they knew there is no money to even maintain it and this collapse was a likely outcome why not lower the platform in advance before any cable breaks? Just from a safety perspective omitting this seems to be somewhat negligent, no?
So to lower it, they'd have had to do a lot work adding stuff near the cables. Which they already knew to be a lot weaker than they were supposed to be, and of which two had already failed. That would have been the really negligent thing to do, instead of just removing all people from near the dish which was done.
The closest you can get to a safe lowering would be to sever all the anchor points simultaneously so that the platform falls vertically, rather than having a rotational component due to differing total tension forces. And even then, I don't see how that can be done particularly safely, given that any human in proximity to any of the towers at the time of premature collapse would be dead.
Just to reiterate: any person working on the support tower platform would have been dead. If not from the cable snapping (you can see how much damage it does to the remaining cables!), then from the support tower itself toppling over a few seconds later.
There is no safety perspective if there is nobody there to get hurt. It has been evacuated for a long time now. Putting people anywhere near it would create the safety concern.
And the risk would obviously have been gigantic as two cables had already snapped in the same place, so the remaining cables would be under insane and completely out of spec tensions, meaning they could fail at any point during the tentative transfer work.
[0] you either splay open the main cables and replace strands, or you need to jack the entire bridge from below to take down and replace the main cables at once
> The NSF made the announcement on November 19, 2020 that they would decommission Arecibo over the following few weeks after determining the safest route to do so with a safety exclusion zone immediately put in place.