Angry in the Great White North

According to Liberal MP Garth Turner, his signs are being singled out for attack:

Well, I guess the wars have started. The Halton Con candidate’s signs finally started to go up yesterday, about the same time ours went down. Amazing how the wind blows so much harder on red stuff.

Wars?  Well, it is true that his signs seem to be the only ones that have fallen:

But is there a simpler explanation?

With some help, I got some pictures of the downed signs.

Here is a downed sign:

Here is a close-up of the leg of the sign:

And the hole in which it was placed:

And finally, a measurement of the hole's depth:

That's a three-foot tall wooden stake pounded barely six inches into the muddy ground.

Do you see what I'm getting at?

It all comes down to levers.  A lever is a beam on a fulcrum.  The side of the beam you push on is called the effort, and the side on which you attach the weight to be moved is called the load.

A small application of force can move a heavy weight when the effort side is longer than the load side.  The greater the relative difference, that is, the larger the ratio, the more weight can be moved.

Now look at the signs again.  Two and a half feet on the effort side, and six inches on the load side.  The force being applied to the effort is that of the fierce winds we've had in southern Ontario catching these broad signs.  That force is transmitted to the load side, one fifth the length of the effort side, and is being transferred to the loosened rain-sodden ground.

Look at the third picture and you get a sense of how the motion of the stake pushed back the ground to widen the hole so much that before long there was nothing holding the stake down.

The 5-to-1 ratio in Garth Turner's signs greatly increased the force of the wind on the load side, that is, how hard the stakes were pushing against the dirt into which they had been pounded.

In a properly mounted sign, the three-foot stake is pounded in a foot into the ground.  Common sense tells us that is a much stronger placement.  Physics tells us that such a stake is equivalent to a 2-to-1 ratio lever.  The force applied by the wind to the signs is transmitted to the load side, but because the ratio of effort to load is so much less, far less force is applied to the ground.

OK, that's just a lot of physics to explain the bleedin' obvious -- Garth Turner didn't pound the stakes in far enough, not even close.

At least some of his signs fell over because a wind blew on these poorly installed signs.  Perhaps that's why most of them fell over.  Maybe even all of them?

Enough sign whining already.

And maybe then Garth Turner could apologize for smearing Conservatives for sign vandalism, admitting that his accusations aren't as firmly grounded as they ought to be.