Discovery Channel Man Made Marvels Kuala Lumpur Flood Control 3/4

9.7 kilometers long traveling under downtown KL with a three-kilometer highway in the middle a combination that has never been attempted before David parks is the chief engineer for the smart tunnel the man responsible for making the impossible possible we were working on a project that nobody had ever done before nobody'd ever designed it now when I'd ever built it either so we were definitely venturing into the unknown really the bulk of the tunnel will channel flood water under the city while the middle section will carry traffic most of the time these parts will be separate [Music] but when a major flood threatens the road will be evacuated and the entire tunnel opened up to flood water gasps GLaDOS aka the mole is brought in to manage the tunnel project normal people do a tunnel and then disappear into something else something more clever only the crazy ones stay in the business Gus has spent 35 years working underground there isn't anyone better than the mole to tackle a project as groundbreaking as this but Gus's experience is about to be challenged by a problem millions of years in the making just below the city is a layer of waterlogged silt on top of a dangerous network of limestone cavities it's called cast and it's a tunnellers worst nightmare then I realize that this this is it and I will have to build a tunnel here as I said I started to read about it and the more I read the more frightened I became kostik limestone forms when rainwater eats away at limestone bedrock it starts as just a few ridges but over millions of years the limestone gets eroded away until it becomes the worst case scenario people ask me how comes that there is not that much casting tunneling literature I had my answer was that because clever people avoid building tunnels in cast and if they do they don't write about it because they don't like to publish horror stories the danger zone lies at the interface between the rock and the soil when construction passes from one to the other the soil loses pressure and collapses causing a cave-in in the tunnel below and creating a giant sinkhole in the city above [Music] but Gus as a secret weapon that could save the day we thought that we have a good chance in using a certain type of tunnel-boring machine namely the most complicated machine money can buy tunnel-boring machines called TBMs a standard issue in the tunneling industry but most only dig and are small [Music] Gus's custom-built TBM is four stories high and a staggering 20 stories long [Music] it cuts rock [Music] Secours unstable sorter and builds the tunnel walls the tunnel excavation begins in the heart of the city 30 meters down inside a giant man-made crater here the only evidence of the TBM is the large hole it leaves in its wake the dbms powerful cutting head slices the rock from the face in front of a machine but the secret weapon wise at the other end massive pipes that run the length of the tunnel connect to a factory where they make a magic mud it's cold bentonite slurry and it's the key to tunneling through cast the slurry is a mixture of bentonite clay and water [Music] unlike regular liquid it becomes thicker and stronger when pressure is applied [Music] it's this that allows the KL tunneling team to defy the odds they pump the bentonite slurry to the head of the TBN through a pressure chamber that thickens the slurry then into the excavation face this thickened venta night acts as a plug reinforcing the fragile soil and avoiding collapse the final step to build the tunnel walls as the excavation moves forward the wall segments are moved into place by the ultimate remote-control vehicle it's called a vacuum erector and it lifts the 10-ton segments using suction alone remarkable teamwork then positions each of the 50,000 segments into place [Music] giant bolts hold them fast [Music] and grout completes the job the grout fills the gap behind the wall and protects the tunnel from the crushing pressure of the city above on a good day the team can install almost 30 segments an hour but when things go wrong the results can be disastrous [Applause] 20 meters below the surface of Kuala Lumpur progress on the smart tunnel has come to a standstill the pipe carrying the bentonite slurry has burst the result what they had been trying to avoid has happened right beside the highway the sudden increasing slurry pressure actually blew a hole on the surface and we had a nice big sinkhole at that particular area miraculously the sinkhole misses the actual highway no one is killed but below the surface the soil has engulfed the TBM they must secure the site before tunneling can resume the same grout used to seal the tunnel is injected into the sinkhole this man-made rock creates a false work face and the team of back in action but above-ground a different type of sinkhole threatens the entire project the final line of defense requires storing 10 million cubic meters of storm water until the floods recede [Music] the engineers brand to use abandoned mining ponds scattered around the city but when they start excavating they discover a fatal flaw the old haunts are filled with highly porous soot as water filled the ponds it would seep into the silt creating fracture lines then when the water was released these fracture lines would collapse if they are to avoid this disaster and save the project the engineers must find a way to reinforce the ponds [Music] a team of Earth's stabilizing experts have a revolutionary product that could solve the problem but it's a little unorthodox we had overcome people's perceptions that your sheet pile doesn't look like a standard sheet pile I'm not sure that I like it sheet piles are the industry standard for reinforcing an unstable site traditional sheet piles are made by molding hot steel it's a one shape fits most process in the spring but Kevin and the boys at the earth support company approach things from a different angle their sheet piles combined metalwork 101 this is a very nice well with the ancient art of origami a sheet of raw steel is as flimsy as a piece of paper incapable of holding itself up let alone millions of cubic tons of water soaked soil [Applause] but fold it in just the right way and you turn unusable

Channel: Ariff Ishak

Views: 469,628

Rating: 4.5261917 out of 5

Keywords: channel, avi, new, disney, youtube, discovery, news, disney channel, x264, channel icon, mpeg4, history, intro, new channel, welcome, stars, icons, discovery channel, control, new icon, mind, malaysia, engineering, massive, asia, Discovery, Channel, Man, Made, Marvels, Kuala, Lumpur, Flood, Control, 3/4

Id: w4MelscxP3A

Length: 11min 9sec (669 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 12 2011