TV Guide: Extreme Engineering

Video: Extreme Engineering - Container Ships: How to Build a Ship

Turbo — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Take a look into the surprisingly simple task of building a quarter mile container ship.

Video: Widening the Panama Canal

Amazon Video on Demand — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Every day ships the size of a city block transport goods through the Panama Canal, one of the world's most vital waterways. For almost a century, it has permitted almost every type of ship imaginable to make the fifty mile shortcut to sail between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. But today ships are being turned away because they're just too big. So Panama has asked a team of European and American engineers to compete for a winning lock design. If the Canal is built anew, what are the dangers and what are the costs? Panama needs a larger canal. The risks of transiting the existing one are becoming too high. The maximum size ships have only inches to spare in the aging lock chambers. The route through the mountains is fraught with hazardous twists and turns. Landslides are a constant threat. If a ship had an accident in the Canal it could stop world trade. A new Panama Canal will once again make Panama the maritime center for world shipping.

Video: Building Hong Kong's Airport

Amazon Video on Demand — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

In the 1990s, the government of Hong Kong undertook the largest civil engineering project in history: building a new international airport 16 miles out to sea. They had no other choice. The old airport, Kai Tak, was stuck in the middle of downtown Hong Kong. Air cargo and traffic is the economic lifeblood of this island territory, and with no room to grow, the old airport had to be replaced. A site was selected off the coast of a rocky island, and a gigantic platform was built by leveling two small islands and reclaiming the rest from the ocean floor. A huge terminal was built on top of the new island, the largest enclosed space in the world. To reach the new airport, a completely new transportation infrastructure had to be built, including a series of world-class highways, bridges, tunnels, and railways. And everything was completed in record time, as engineers raced against a formidable deadline -- Britain's return of Hong Kong to the Chinese. Finished on time and under budget, the p

Video: Extreme Engineering Season 1

Amazon Video on Demand — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

It might be a three-dimentsional city 12 times higher than the Great Pyramid of Giza "floating" over Tokyo Bay. Or a 55-mile-long bridge across the Berin Strait that would connect Asia and North American for the first time since the last Ice Age. Or even a 3,100-mile-long tunnel in the Atlantic Ocean that would serve trains traveling up to 5,000 miles per hour. Extreme Engineering showcases the challenges of designing and building the largest and most outrageous and awe-inspiring projectes ever conceived. Through rich computer animations you'll see how teh maaxing structures take shape, and you're there as engineers and scientists from around the world tackle the most daring feats of design and construction every attempted.

Video: Bridging the Bering Strait

Amazon Video on Demand — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Already on the drawing boards, The Bridge rejoins North America and Asia. It will generate unprecedented economic growth on both continents and is another link in The Great Global Highway introduced in "ETI I". Its 220 spans cross the Arctic Ocean over 55 miles of violent seas and crushing ice. Each span is 1200 feet long, with two center spans 1800 feet long and high enough to accommodate large ships. The bridge's road deck is a giant double-box, allowing for two-way truck, car and train traffic, as well as oil, gas and electric pipelines. The bridge's spans rest on hundreds of concrete gravity piers, each weighing millions of pounds to withstand the pressure of millions of tons of moving Arctic ice. Because the weather is among the fiercest on earth, the entire bridge is encased in concrete, including the cables. Potential disasters will come from ice, ships ice-bound, grinding into piers, and from fires in the inner box caused by vehicle collisions or train derailments.

Video: Boston's Big Dig

Amazon Video on Demand — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

It is one of the largest, most technically and environmentally challenging infrastructure projects in American history. It contains possibly more "engineering marvels" than any other single construction project attempted by man. It includes an 8 to 10-lane-wide highway winding underground 120 feet deep through downtown Boston, a new tunnel beneath the city's harbor, and the widest cable-stayed bridge in the world. The project spans only 8 miles, but has taken 30 years to plan, 12 years to build, and cost $14.6 billion, and it still has three more years to go! The budget, even after adjusting for inflation, is larger than the budget of the Panama Canal. At the peak of construction, the project employed 5,000 workers and used 150 giant cranes every day. When the Big Dig is finally done, it will have excavated 16 million cubic yards of dirt -- enough to fill up fifteen professional football stadiums. It will have used 4 million cubic yards of concrete, enough to build a sidewalk 3-feet wi

Video: Holland's Barriers to the Sea

Amazon Video on Demand — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Most of Holland is below sea level, a drainage basin for three major rivers. In the Middle Ages, people started building dikes to keep the sea out, and today there are about 1000 miles of them. But in 1953, a sea surge inundated 800 square miles of land, killed 1800 people, destroyed 47,000 homes, 200,000 animals and 300 miles of dikes. That and the hurricanes of '93 and '95 spawned the design and construction of one of the engineering wonders of the world, the Delta Works and Measlandkering. The Delta Works is a series of massive, computer-controlled sea barriers and dams that straddle each of the major rivers emptying into the delta. The Measlandkering is a gigantic and beautiful sea surge barrier a quarter-of-a-mile wide that consists of two horizontal, curved hydraulically-run walls, each of whose giant sea "arms" is 1000 feet long. Powered by water and electrically-driven windmills, it has over 60 75-foot-high floodgates that remain up in good weather, allowing the three rivers to

Video: Tokyo's Sky City

Amazon Video on Demand — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

In Japan, plans are on the table to build the tallest structure on earth. Called Sky City, it will be a kilometer tall, twice the height of any existing building. The towering, vertical city will house more than 100,000 people and provide for every aspect of modern life with parks, schools, homes, offices and shops. A solution to Tokyo's terrible land crunch, Sky City would be home to the world's very first homesteaders in the sky. But troubling questions surround it. Can it be built? And would it be safe from disasters both natural and man made, including earthquakes, typhoons and the very worst that can strike a tall building: deadly fire. Engineers and builders in Japan, Taiwan and Canada tackle these and other tough problems as they attempt to overcome obstacles and set the stage for the construction of one of the most daring feats of engineering ever attempted.

Video: City in a Pyramid

Amazon Video on Demand — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Tokyo is one of the most crowded cities in the world with nowhere left to build. To relieve the stress on a city bursting at the seams, engineers have trained their imaginations to the only vacant lot around the waters of Tokyo Bay. The dream: to build a massive Pyramid over the water, with skyscrapers suspended like peapods within it's enormous frame. Called the Shimizu Mega-City Pyramid it would be a kilometer tall and could be home to 750,000 people -- and possibly without the help of human builders. With the invention of new super-lightweight materials, humanoid robots, and self-assembling structures the pyramid might be the first city in the world able to build itself. But troubling questions plague it. Can it find the energy it needs not to be a burden on Tokyo? And would it be safe from one of nature's most terrifying forces -- the massive tidal waves called tsunamis? Engineers and scientists in the U.S., Japan, Canada, Scotland and Wales are hard at work tackling these and othe

Video: Transatlantic Tunnel

Amazon Video on Demand — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

A Trans-Atlantic floating tunnel carries 5000-mile-an-hour, Mag-lev (magnetically levitated) trains between New York, London and Paris. The train makes the 3100 mile journey in less than an hour. Passengers and freight travel in climate-controlled cars. The tunnel floats 150 feet under the North Atlantic's surface -- enough room for ships to pass safely overhead. The steel cables that tether the tunnel to the ocean floor are controlled by GPS and computers systems that can adjust the cables for shifts in ocean currents and tectonic plates. Passengers enjoy the comfort of specially designed seats that would relieve the effects of g-forces while whales and nuclear subs glide soundlessly around them. Prototypes are being built in Norway and Japan. Disaster is always possible. The Gulf Stream's massive current could bend and crack the tunnel. A nuclear sub could ram it. And if two trains were to collide and a fire broke out, or if the train's oxygen supply failed, the results could be cata

Video: Tunneling Under the Alps

Amazon Video on Demand — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

35 miles long, this Swiss monster is the longest tunnel in the world. Miners are risking death right now as billions of pounds of mountain bear down on them -- hot, young rock, 120 degrees F., tough, shifting and unstable. Engineers are using custom-designed TBMs (Tunnel Boring Machines) 250 feet long, 33 feet in diameter, with 500-pound drilling heads that are changed from inside the machine so miners don't get killed outside by cave-ins. In this subterranean world, rock actually explodes. Walls crumble, floods erupt, mud flows. Laser imaging helps engineers see dimly ahead to potential fractures and cave-ins, but they're working in hell. Once a section is dug, concrete walls are thrown up to keep it from collapsing, but if the concrete dries too fast, it implodes under the pressure and the mountain drops on them. Unfortunately, Alpine tunnels stay dangerous forever. In the last two years, truck collisions have turned three of them into infernos, killing 220 people. To most of the wor

Video: Subways in America

Amazon Video on Demand — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

The world's great cities have always struggled to find a balance between the need to attract more and more people and their ability to transport them efficiently. For almost a century, New York City has relied on the subway to transport its ever-expanding population. But after decades of neglect, New York's once great subway was nearing collapse. "Subways in America" chronicles one of the most ambitious public works projects in the history of the US: a complete overhaul of the entire New York Subway. And today, New York's subway is coming back with a new super system that will restore its legendary status.