Drain Alcatraz: The World's Most Notorious Prison (Full Episode) | Drain the Oceans SPECIAL

Alcatraz the rock the most infamous prison on Earth well I think Alcatraz was the perfect present for the time it was the big stick against Crime America's worst Al Capone Machine Gun Kelly and Whitey Bulger all called The Rock home the Island lies just over a mile offshore but Escape was almost impossible prisoners who tried faced icy waters deadly currents disorienting fog and fearsome predators to understand these dangerous forces a new investigation pulls a plug on the sea floor and drains the Waters of San Francisco Bay it will reveal the secrets of the seabed with stunning computer graphics can the underwater landscape explain the Rock's reputation as an inescapable prison in 1962 three men did break out from Alcatraz will draining the bay throw new light on what happened to them they entered the water at the North End and took off in a raft never to be seen again did they reach the mainland and freedom or did the Ferocious currents shaped by the seabed seal their fate and can this underwater landscape show why Alcatraz might be the safest place when the next earthquake hits California secrets are revealed as we drain Alcatraz the island of Alcatraz sits alone in the middle of San Francisco Bay within this dramatic landscape Alcatraz and the remnants of the renowned U.S federal prison are just a mile from the Heart of the City for 29 years it held some of the most dangerous and notorious criminals in history Alcatraz was the end of the line and that's what it was designed for it was the place where they could take and isolate the troublemakers the gang leaders the most problematic the most Troublesome prisoners they send them to Alcatraz officially no one successfully escaped The Rock but why exactly was no inmate able to break out of Alcatraz to answer this high resolution sonar scans plot the hidden depths of San Francisco Bay for the first time Cutting Edge computer Graphics transformed the scans into remarkable images of the seabed this is Alcatraz as never seen today the island is a museum run by the National Park Service over a million people visit every year one man has watched it rise to become one of America's most visited attractions Ranger John Cantwell he's worked on the island for over 25 years he knows its history there's a term that we use on Alcatraz layers of history and the first layer of History would be the Army's time on Alcatraz they arrive in 1853 and built a fortress to protect the harbor the Federal Bureau of Prisons take over in 1934 and they ran the island for 29 years as a super max penitentiary American Justice reserved Alcatraz for the worst of the worst the prison was fortified to make sure they would stay put where I'm standing is on Broadway this is the main Corridor in the cell house Alcatraz being a supermax Penitentiary meant that you had high security one officer for every three convicts they were constantly being watched 12 times a day they would have counted every convict in this Penitentiary building Prison Breaks were suppressed with extreme force but Escape was a constant temptation Freedom was just a short swim away the punishment of Alcatraz was this the view of what was going on across the bay everything's in plain view and these men that were incarcerated on Alcatraz could see it I think it's fair to say every guy that ever did time here considered how are you going to escape Liberty seemed so close that for some it was irresistible the official count is a 14 different Escape attempts of that number five men are still unaccounter for to make it off the island the convicts first had to escape from the prison itself probably one of the most famous Escape attempts from the building is the 1937 Rowan coal escape attempt they cut through the windows and pop out into the San Francisco Bay and they said boats out looking for those uh two guys and never found them the official on this is is that they were swept out to sea powerful currents weren't the only dangers facing escapees Alcatraz folklore claimed that predatory sharks swam in the Bay Area in 1959 a college student had been killed by a great white in these Waters and in 2015 the Alcatraz shark Legend was confirmed on camera when tourists witnessed a great white attacking a seal on the Island's dock but fear of shark attacks didn't stop the Escape attempts and these were becoming easier as the fabric of Alcatraz began to crumble the complex was aging concrete starts to crack and spall steel rusts barbed wire rusts it's almost impossible to make an escape-proof prison in the last year before the prison closed there were two remarkable Escape attempts in December 1962 two men made it to the water John Paul Scott and Daryl Parker escaped from the basement of the penitentiary building and they cut through two bars the basement window pop out the window shimmy up a set of pipes scramble across the rooftop of the cell house and basically came down off the West Wall of Alcatraz Island scrambled down this road and hit the water they found Daryl Parker standing on that rock a little Alcatraz Island about 50 yards off the North End waving to the officer in the guard Tower yelling come get me but they found John Paul Scott at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge John Paul Scott was officially the only prisoner to successfully swim across the bay but he was so exhausted when they found him that he was quickly returned to Alcatraz there was one other escape attempt in 1962. the most famous in the prison's history three convicts Frank Morris and brothers Clarence and John Anglin planned for months to escape and eventually got off the island on a homemade raft but they were never seen again case is still alive the official record is their presumed drowned it's one of the great Alcatraz Mysteries could Morris and the Anglin Brothers have been the only ones to make it to Freedom Alcatraz closed in the spring of 1963. officially no one escaped successfully but its true strength as a prison can't be explained just by the thickness of its walls or the vigilance of its guards the waters around the rock were also a deadly barrier to escape now science can explain just how and why the bay was so dangerous imagine you could pull the plug on the bottom of the bay and drain the water from around Alcatraz for the first time we combine high definition sonar scans and cutting-edge computer images to uncover the Hidden World of the seabed and this remarkable landscape finally an unobstructed view of Alcatraz it's a rock that rises from San Francisco Bay it's isolated but it's highly visible from the shore also you can reach out and touch it but it's a mile and a half away draining the bay reveals Alcatraz as a pinnacle of Bedrock emerging from the sea floor it's surrounded by mountain peaks all of them are ancient survivors from an age of earthquakes Tom Parsons is a geophysicist with the United States geographical survey he has studied this area for decades so we're standing at the Golden Gate and we're standing on mountains that were formed 100 million years ago we're sandwiched right between the San Andreas and the parallel Hayward fault both of which are helping to accommodate plate motion here between the Pacific and North American plates San Francisco sits right on the edge of the North American Plate as the Pacific Plate grinds North past it stress builds up along the major fault lines in the area the Hayward fault and most notably the San Andreas this region is very volatile it produces large earthquakes we've seen them in 1906 1868 both were devastating earthquakes in San Francisco the nightmarish effects of the 1906 earthquake 7.9 on the Richter Scale are a reminder of how the area's violent geology threatens the existence of a great City over a hundred million years ago the landscape is entirely different there was a third plate between the two larger ones called the Farallon the Fairlawn play used to sit between the Pacific and North American Plate it was shoved underneath the North American Plate over all that time the movement of the Farallon plate was the Catalyst that created San Francisco Bay and Alcatraz as it ground under the North American Plate this process is called subduction as the Farallon plate disappeared fragments of the Earth's crust were forced upwards creating a valley and mountains the Alcatraz was part of the Coast Range belt that was uplifted by the subduction of the Fairlawn plate the Bay Area was then a Long forested Valley with a number of Rocky Mountains one of these mountains was Alcatraz ten thousand years ago has the last ice age came to an end the area was deluged by billions of gallons of melt water this created what we call San Francisco Bay [Music] tras Island forms this 1853 photograph shows the tip of the drowned Mountain as a featureless rock in the middle of the Bay Alcatraz may look tranquil and isolated but it's surrounded by powerful Natural Forces by draining the bay we can explain why the island earned its deadly reputation and what may have happened during the 1962 Escape from Alcatraz [Music] we're pulling the plug on San Francisco Bay and draining the waters to discover why escaping from Alcatraz was so dangerous foreign over three decades there were 14 daring Escape attempts the story of one of these is legendary probably the most famous escape attempt would be the 1962 Breakout Frank Lee Morris and brothers Charles and John Anglin devised an audacious bid for freedom the escape attempt was incredibly ingenious and it involves stealing an immense amount of material dozens of rubber raincoats glue electric motors to turn into drills the guys even made a periscope they made a flashlight and used homemade tools to breach the Prison Walls [Music] we're in one of the Anglin Brothers cells and they were ingenious to actually create a portal at the back of their cell and they fashioned a drill made out of a vacuum cleaner engine put a diamond bit on the end of this thing and then poked holes through the concrete to loosen up the concrete around the air vent dummy heads were made out of concrete material human hair glued onto the heads and the face is painted on these heads and at night with the lights down it looked like they were sleeping in their cells so in the cell house the lights go out at 9 30. that's basically when they make their break once the lights are out the heads are in place they go up to the rooftop and they've got from 9 30 to 6 30 the next morning to make it to the mainland [Music] rubber raincoats glued together the escapees construct a makeshift raft and life vests this is their Lifeline to Freedom they carry everything to the roof and drag it down to the water's edge so this is the actual spot where they enter the water frankly Morris and the Anglin Brothers came down this Hillside they dragged their wrap inflated it at the sea wall here jumped in and took off into the night they searched the waters looking for these three men and the raft or the men were never found the official FBI documents State the three men and their raft were most likely swept out to sea their bodies were never recovered but is this what really happened were they lost at sea or could they have made it to the mainland to understand the fate of the three escapees on their raft scientists are studying the geology of the bay itself can the seabed offer an answer first Patrick Barnard from the United States Geological Survey explores the underwater landscape at the mouth of San Francisco Bay he hopes analysis of the seabed will explain the powerful currents that surge around Alcatraz making Escape attempts so dangerous today we're going to be mapping from the Golden Gate Bridge West toward the outer Coast so it'll be very interesting to see what's on the seafloor in that area the first time that high-tech multi-beam scanners have been used to explore how the seabed itself may have shaped the prisoners Faith the incredible thing about multi-beam is it captures the seafloor and high resolution so we get a sounding at least every one meter along the sea floor so we can see incredible detail what the seafloor looks like this remarkable technology projects thousands of sound waves towards the seat the waves reflect off the Contours giving the team an unprecedented view of the bottom the investigation begins under the most iconic location in San Francisco we're right underneath the Golden Gate Bridge at the narrowest part of the Golden Gate Strait The Purple represents the deeper parts of the channel which are about 92 meters deep in this location after several passes over the Deep channel the monitor shows a strange landscape below we're seeing a largely featureless bottom in this whole Center portion of the swath that's scoured clean to bedrock draining the water from under the Golden Gate Bridge reveals a huge Gorge it's far deeper than the rest of the Bay large enough to hide a 30-story building but what happens to the seabed when the multi-beam vessel heads West into the open ocean we're located a little over a kilometer from the Golden Gate Bridge now to the West but the bottom is still clean it's still Bedrock lined as the boat moves farther from the bridge the water grows much shallower the sonar readings suggest a dramatic transformation in the Seascape below the bottom is changing we're seeing a lot more sediment on the sea floor now draining the water reveals an incredible sight we're starting to see some very large sand waves here that are emerging from the depths of the Golden Gate Strait these formations on the seabed are huge so the largest sand waves are about 200 meters long six meters high the biggest one's 10 meters high or about three stories and they're sitting just yards away from the harbor entrance they look like probably what the Sahara would look like if you were walking through it giant sand waves are caused by the huge tidal rush through the Golden Gate Strait the fast-moving water picks up sand and dumps it as it slows down the sand waves of the mouth of San Francisco Bay are there because you have this very large Estuary and all the tidal flow associated with it roughly 2 trillion liters of water being forced through in every tide huge title forces push water through the narrow channel the solid Bedrock of the gorge does not erode so the straight acts like a fire hose as the water rushes through it and the flow is 160 times greater than the volume of water cascading over Niagara Falls you have all the sand and gravel be carried along and forced for this narrow opening and then as the opening widens further and further all this material gets deposited in these bed forms the drained landscape shows how the geology of the seabed shapes the powerful tidal currents in San Francisco Bay first there's the deep gorge that funnels the water into a jet stream moving West beyond the bridge the seabed rises from over 300 feet deep to just 130 feet the drain shows how the racing current dumps thousands of tons of sand creating these giant sand waves up to 30 feet high but what does this underwater landscape of the Golden Gate have to do with escaping from Alcatraz these racing tides are what the inmates had to contend with when fleeing The Rock possible that Frank Morris and the Anglin Brothers got caught in these Wicked currents the records from the 1962 FBI investigation show the tide charts on June 11th from 9 pm to 3 A.M there was a strong outgoing tide which peaked at exactly 11 46 pm so when did the three escapees hit the water in their homemade raft from the moment lights out happened which I think was 9 30 as soon as they could have they would have gotten out of theirselves give it an hour hour and a half to have gotten everything that they needed to through that vent on the roof crossed the cell house down the other side hit the water I think that they started paddling as soon as they got to the water let's say 11 o'clock the three convicts would have been in the water at Peak title flow during an ebbing outgoing tide what were their chances if their flimsy raft made of raincoats broke up leaving them to swim in the powerful currents if you try to escape off the North End of the island especially during ebbing tide like they did in 1962 where the currents are extremely strong and moving straight out to sea it was very difficult to swim out of that current within an hour and a half you could have been on the open Coast so Morris and the Anglin Brothers had to struggle with the fastest and deadliest current flow in the bay and these currents show no mercy known to destroy vessels far larger than a raft San Francisco Bay is a ship's graveyard draining the San Francisco Bay reveals a deep ominous Gorge under the Golden Gate Bridge and giant sand waves rising from the seabed evidence of massive water flow through the mouth of the Bay two and a half miles to the east of the Golden Gate lies Alcatraz this is a great example of the tidal movement around Alcatraz Island I'd gauge this at about a five knot tide it is possible to swim from Alcatraz to the mainland but only during the brief period when the tides are turning and the currents slow down and I've done the swim on a slack tide and there's no way that you'd catch me in this water trying to make it to San Francisco Fierce currents were just one of the challenges inmates faced when they tried to escape there were other deadly hazards Bill Baker is one of the few surviving inmates from Alcatraz a convict sent to the rock for three years in 1957. after attempting to break out from other prisons but escaping Alcatraz was another matter I thought about it a lot but I couldn't figure out how to beat the water because the water kills you because it's cold that water is the wall that kept us here and it killed a lot of people trying to escape and so that was becomes very ugly you know after you look at a wall water that frightened Bill Baker is caused by the upwelling of cold currents from the deep ocean these replace the warmer surface waters relentlessly churned up by the Strong Winds of San Francisco Bay average temperatures range from a bone chilling 51 to 60 degrees Fahrenheit in these conditions hypothermia will quickly overwhelm any swimmer but when this cold water mixes with warm air it creates another killer that silently invades the bay fog thick fog could be a prisoner's friend concealing a breakout from Alcatraz in 1937 two men escaped from the industries building into the fog they basically timed it between the head counts they had about a 45 minute jump on the officers before they realized that they were missing for Ralph Rowe and Ted Cole the fog offered cover once they were off the island but the white out also posed a threat if some were to escape into the foggy Bay it would be you know almost an impossible type of situation be very dangerous be disorienting so you know that would be almost a worst case type of scenario for someone to try and Escape in Jan null knows all about fog he's been a local San Francisco meteorologist for years but why is fog so prevalent in this part of the world the mechanism that creates the classic fog for San Francisco is you know a a Sea Breeze circulation as that air flows over the very cold water along the California coast it condenses out forms the Marine layer fog and then that spreads inland there is only one place for fog to reach San Francisco the only sea level gap for that fog to get through is the Golden Gate so that's the area that's going to get the most fog it's focused you know from the gate right toward Alcatraz and then on toward Berkeley when Roe and Cole escaped they quickly vanished into the white out it was December it was cold one eyewitness he saw them he claims have seen him in the water being swept out 99.9 sure they didn't make it the thick fog made rescue impossible row and coal were never seen again the FBI speculated they had died in the icy water the San Francisco Bay fog mixed with the wicked fast-moving currents is a recipe for disaster by draining the water we can see the results of this deadly combination there are ghostly large artifacts scattered on the seabed dozens of shipwrecks San Francisco Bay is a graveyard of lost ships and there is one just east of the Golden Gate Bridge deep down on the side of the gorge it has a tragic tale to tell the Shipwreck is the city of Chester but how did it get here August 1888 the city of Chester moves towards the Golden Gate Strait August is a time when you get heavy fogs around here and it was foggy she's heading out to Golden Gate at the time when a great ocean liner is heading in far larger far faster now 130 years later National Park historian Steve Haller and archaeologist Peter gavette are searching for the Lost vessel city of Chester went down rapidly and she sang in 200 or so feet of water we're over the spot where She lays multi-beam sonar gives a tantalizing glimpse of the sunken ship see the superstructure in there the fact that the city of Chester is is hasn't been covered with sediment is is great with the multi-beam data we can look at the city of Chester wreck as it happened using the data from the scan we can Now drain the wreck of the city of Chester does it offer any evidence of how the disaster unfolded you can see exactly where the Fatal damage to the ship occurred and you could see how that bow sections off kilter with the rest of the ship so it broke her keel the drained ship is the crime scene giving clear evidence of its fate we can actually see where it was struck aft of the the port side just after the bow and very almost split it in two in the thick fog the city of Chester and the white star liner Oceanic are on a collision course they don't see each other until it's too late powerful currents drive them together city of Chester Hills off to Port the oceanic hits her in the side far heavier vessel splitzer Hall the smaller ship is fatally wounded the city of Chester sinks in only six minutes killing 16 people on board she is just one of many shipwrecks that lie on the bottom of San Francisco Bay the deadly result of extreme natural forces that make this Bay so dangerous these are the same forces that escape ease from Alcatraz had to contend with most notably Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers who escaped the Island prison on June 11 1962. what would their chances have been in these conditions if you consider the two ocean-going steamers can get tossed around to the point where one cuts the other one in half what are the odds of three guys in a rapidly deflating homemade rubber raft gonna have but could the powerful currents in the bay have instead helped the escapees could they have been pushed to shore and to Freedom in 1962 three prisoners launched a legendary Escape from Alcatraz in a homemade raft ever since there have been wildly different rumors about their fate some claim to have seen them on the mainland but that conflicts with the official FBI report which states that their objective was Angel Island a two-mile paddle north of Alcatraz they did what nobody else ever did they got off the island with a head start and and were never seen again the official Bureau prisons report on these three men in the raft is that they raft took on water the men were in the San Francisco Bay they became hypothermic and the currents took them out to the Pacific never proved and when the story broke around the world there was excitement and intrigue it appears to be the first successful Escape in the history of the Maximum Security Prison for weeks the FBI searched the bay their goal was to find them dead or alive the Escape triggered the greatest Manhunt in San Francisco's history [Music] though they never discovered any trace of the bodies the FBI did find evidence of the Escape they recovered two of the inflatable life vests they recovered a two of the plywood paddles found floating in different places in the bay another one of the life vests was recovered outside the Golden Gate at a beach north of the Golden Gate there was no lack of evidence that they escaped this evidence was scattered all over the Bay Area with no signs of the men how did this happen could the Three Fugitives have made it is there a possibility that the strong currents worked in the escapees favor by pushing them to the shore Patrick Barner and his USGS colleague Josh Logan explore this intriguing Theory they use high-tech buoys with GPS sensors to track the currents the conditions are very similar to what they would have been during the escape in 1962 where a Peak at flow the water is moving about a meter and a half a second or about five and a half kilometers per hour the GPS will be recording its position every five seconds we'll be able to pick that up on our laptop and be able to track it in real time and that'll let us know that the direction and the speed that the water is moving okay so we are tracking now I'm going to deploy The Drifter the buoy is dropped at the North End of Alcatraz on the escapees route to Angel Island at first the buoys path seems to confirm the theory that the men were swept out to sea it's drifting about averaging about six kilometers an hour right now in 15 minutes we've drifted uh about half the distance between Alcatraz and the Golden Gate it looks like it's going right down the middle of the Golden Gate Strait been in a strong headwind fast moving current pushes the buoy further out but then the unexpected happens it's going about six kilometers an hour until it hit that that seam and then it slowed down to uh one kilometer an hour the buoy stops just before the Golden Gate Bridge it's not what the team had predicted all right looks like it just sort of slowed down because it got into an Eddy that's pretty interesting so you can see it was traveling Southwest in a straight line until I hit that Eddy and then it slowed down and changed directions and Eddie is created by water moving in a circular motion almost like a slow-moving whirlpool can draining the water from San Francisco Bay reveal anything that would cause such a giant Eddy just east of the bridge there is a strange feature on the seabed right toward the Golden Gate there's some very shallow depths from a large Bedrock outcrop known as a sill in this location and so this causes an uprush of a lot of water and eventually some flow separation causing this Eddy the deep water currents run directly into the Bedrock Zoo forcing the fast flowing water to the surface this creates the giant Eddy which stops the buoy dead in its track draining San Francisco Bay is revealing how powerful currents on the surface that swept men to their deaths are shaped by The Contours below other strange features on the seabed help to explain the deadly outcome of an earlier escape attempt [Music] burglar Aaron Bergen made a break for freedom in September 1958. his friend Bill Baker was an inmate at the time well he was a young man he was like I say he was strong he was strong was abused while on garbage detail Burgett overcame a guard and then jumped into the waters off the west side of Alcatraz they didn't know what happened to forget and they locked the soil Down The Boat Circle in the island all day and night you know search lights and everything and every day that passed we were more optimistic that he was gone though the prisoners hoped he made it two weeks later the authorities found Bergen but then one day his body washed up and then that was the end of that I was very sad about that because I hope that like heck that he made it strangely burgett's body was found just yards off the shores of Alcatraz so why wasn't he washed out to sea by the powerful currents in the bay the clues May lie in the shallow Waters around Alcatraz they've never been accurately mapped before now Professor Rick vitek from California State University Monterey uses a one-of-a-kind surveying vessel to explore the terrain is it designed to work in all the places a conventional vessel can't go to work in shallow water around rocks and it's outfitted with all the sonar systems found on a normal hydrographic vessel except it's all operated by one after a day of scanning the shallows back and forth along the western Cliffs Professor kvitec's survey helps explain what happened to Aaron burget's body the drained seabed around Alcatraz shows dozens of large rocks and crevices when burgit drowned his body probably sank to the bottom and became trapped in these rocks later as it decomposed gases forming in the corpse would have lifted it to the surface the 1962 escapees didn't try to swim to Freedom they used a homemade raft but where they ended up lost out at sea or safe on the mainland is the real mystery Patrick Barnard and Josh Logan hope to confirm how the seabed in San Francisco Bay influences the water currents above they want to determine the course the escaping prisoners took in 1962. the first test buoy stopped dead in a giant Eddy now they deploy two other buoys in different locations along the route to Angel Island we're going to release it a little bit further north from where we released the last Drifter the two buoys begin their Journey towards the Golden Gate the second moves down into the same Eddy as the first but the third buoy heads directly towards the bridge this one seems to be heading out the gate instead of getting caught in that Eddy that we saw further to the South moments later it's past the bridge so that third buoy is uh basically gone straight out the main Channel and uh has sped up the drained seabed shows exactly why this buoy is moving Southwest as it floats slightly further north it moves past the Bedrock sill and misses the Eddy then powerful currents sweep it through the gorge and under the Golden Gate Bridge soon the buoy is in the open ocean we deployed it for about about an hour and it went 6.8 kilometers it had a maximum speed of 10 kilometers an hour it's about in line with the predictions of the model I was surprised the first two didn't make it out but they got caught in these Eddies and this one was going pretty much right as a model predicted it peaking at about 10 kilometers per hour which is uh far faster than anybody can swim getting caught in the Eddies may not have saved the escapees they had to fight against powerful currents to get to the mainland anybody who's trying to paddle to shore they'd be heading Southwest and they'd probably Bloom sideways the buoy test sheds fascinating new light on the 1962 FBI report the two buoys caught in the Eddy moved in different directions including one that amazingly floated back towards Alcatraz this could explain why debris from the prisoner's raft was found near the island after the Escape the path of the third buoy shows that if the prisoners drowned as the FBI believed their heavy bodies could have been swept out to sea by the Ferocious currents but the test truly shows one thing San Francisco Bay is unpredictable the current field is so complex that you could have literally just been a few meters on either side of the main part of the channel it could end up in completely different places you could have ended up 10 kilometers out to sea you're almost right back at Alcatraz but for the three inmates if they did reach the open ocean there was one more deadly challenge because of its high population of great white sharks this area is known as the red triangle in June of 62 it would have also been during upwelling season like it is now so you have lots of nutrients in the water column lots of fish and lots of bigger Predators so it's likely there could have been more great whites in the area than there are during the rest of the year so if they made it this far out Dead or Alive they may have become prey for the great whites [Music] the bodies of the three inmates were never found but now science shows that it is unlikely that they could have survived the infamous prison closed its doors in 1963 with a perfect record there were no successful escapes from Alcatraz though many tried the conditions surrounding this island is what really made an escape-proof prison the bay was the most formidable of the prison's walls you could say that the Bay has really created alcatraz's reputation the perfect prison was the result of extraordinary geology deep Gorges giant underwater sand dunes hard Bedrock pillars at the Golden Gate Strait powerful currents and even great predators that roam the waters outside the bay all natural phenomena that made the rock inescapable but there is another Mighty natural force at work in San Francisco Bay that dwarfs even the power of the ocean currents a drained Pacific Ocean reveals the first clip deep under the waters off the coast of San Francisco lies the infamous San Andreas fault the shifting tectonic plates are the trigger of major earthquakes in the past the most deadly in 1906. over 3 000 people lost their lives but could an even deadlier earthquake hit the area the so-called big one so in our forecast we actually consider an earthquake that could start at the southernmost part of the San Andreas fault run all the way along through the bay area up North involves the entire San Andreas fault Zone that earthquake would be on the scale of 8.2 to 8.4 in magnitude the devastation would be far greater than the destruction caused by the 1989 quake if we were to see an earthquake of that scale in San Francisco because unfortunately a lot of casualties any buildings would collapse freeways and infrastructure type things would be in danger you know if it did happen I think we would see significant destruction in the city and throughout the Bay Area throughout California the massive earthquake could cause parts of the city to topple into the sea much of the downtown core destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge pushed to its engineering limits but when the fire and Smoke Clears one place will still be standing during a big earthquake alcatas would be a safe haven because it is built out of very strong Rock it's not going to collapse under strong shaking like soft soil would it's been there for 100 million years it's hung in there and so it's going to do well under an earthquake if the geologists are correct and when the San Andreas lets go Alcatraz is the safest place to be and that is the ultimate irony the the island that so many men wanted to get away from is the place it's going to offer The Refuge by draining Alcatraz and exposing the secrets hidden on the seabed a different picture of the island emerges the explanations behind its most legendary Mysteries involve more than just the prison itself the geography of San Francisco Bay the waters the Rocks the wind and the fog a tightly woven net making Alcatraz an inescapable place unless the big one hits by draining the waters around Alcatraz the secrets of the rock are revealed [Music] thank you

Channel: National Geographic

Views: 3,680,511

Keywords: national geographic, nat geo, natgeo, animals, wildlife, science, explore, discover, survival, nature, culture, documentary, perpetual planet nat geo, photography, full episode, Drain the Oceans, shipwreck, icy waters, Atlantic Ocean, tragic loss, wreck site, Explore with us, documentary 2023, survival skills, tv shows, Drain Alcatraz, Special videos, Deadly waters, The World's Most Notorious Prison, Notorious Prison

Id: fW7cG0apZwU

Length: 47min 22sec (2842 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 13 2023