NARRATOR: Torrential rains
reveal engineering flaws in Southern California,
million dollar homes slide down a cliff,
and a major road becomes a gigantic sinkhole. In France, the roof of a
monumental airport terminal collapses. Off the coast of Virginia,
an aging coal ship sinks in rough seas,
killing 31 mariners. A deadly plane crash changes
the face of passenger aviation. And a tiny imperfection
creates big problems for one of the most acclaimed
structures of the 21st century. Now "Engineering Disasters"
on "Modern Marvels." [music playing] NARRATOR: Persistent,
heavy rains wreaked havoc throughout
Southern California during the winter of 2004-2005. Los Angeles received 37
and 1/4 inches of rain that season, making it the
wettest year the City of Angels had seen in 121 years. But months would pass before the
rains caused some of the worst damage. On the perfectly sunny
morning of June 1, 2005, residents of Bluebird Canyon
in Laguna Beach, California, were awakened by strange noises. JILL LOCKHART: I heard
really loud popping. It almost sounded like a
BB-gun, like kids in the canyon. And when I realized it was
coming from under the house is when I kind of panicked. So at this point I ran back
to the front of the house. I opened the front door. And I actually saw my curb
separating from my walkway. We could feel the house
moving, and it was very loud, the cracking and popping. HALEY STEVENS: And
we ran outside. I think we were the
first neighbors out. But they quickly followed. Everyone was screaming,
asking, what happened? What happened? What's going on? NARRATOR: What was going on
was that a 7-acre wedge of land was breaking away
from the hillside. It would send these
residents and their homes sliding down the slope. Houses cracked. Streets buckled. Residents ran for their lives. And I grabbed my
two-year-old out of the crib. By scooping the pajamas,
I just pulled my arm. And I knew it right then
that the house was sliding. I didn't know what to do. So I just ran into
my 4-year-old's room. And I put up my arm. And I said get up
and grab mommy's arm. I said the house is breaking. LORI HEREK: Well,
I guess, you know, you might say all
hell broke loose. We tried to get off the street. But as we tried to
go down the road, the street actually opened up. It rose probably about
30 feet into the air. And what we didn't realize was
that the street was falling, that these houses
were coming down. NARRATOR: Flamingo Road
located near the top of the hill and the houses
on it plunged about 75 feet. PAT FUSCOE: What
happened is over a half a million cubic yards
of earth gave way and literally
avalanched down the hill into the bottom of
Bluebird Canyon. And that's about the same amount
of dirt that would fill over 10,000 swimming pools. It's a lot of mass moving very
fast with a lot of energy. MARK JOHNSSON: Now, when this
landslide first occurred, many of my colleagues
were kind of surprised. It wasn't a rainy day. I'm used to landslides
happening on a rainy day. Well, deep seeded
landslides like this don't necessarily
happen on a rainy day. They happen when the water
table has been elevated. And it takes many
months for water to percolate down
deep into the earth. NARRATOR: Usually, seasonal
bursts of heavy rain dumped 12 to 13 inches
on Southern California. The rain runs off
before it's absorbed. However, the 30 plus inches
of rain that soaked the area during 2004-2005 was
a persistent rain over a long period of
time, saturating the earth from October to May. HANNES RICHTER: This landslide
is a bedrock landslide. And the bedrock in this area
is what we call the topanga formation. And it's a mixture of
sand and silt some clays. In particular, there is a
layer at a depth of anywhere from 50 to 80 feet. The clay that the
landslide failed on is a very plastic clay. And by that I mean
when you get it where it's a consistency of Play-Doh. It's not very high
strength material. So when you tilt that up, and
then you compound the problem by having a very heavy rainfall
year, twice normal rain that builds up water into this
and softens the clay, that led to the failure. NARRATOR: The deep
landslide claimed 20 homes, but miraculously no lives. HANNES RICHTER: The interior
structures of the homes are just crumbled into hundreds
and thousands of pieces. Walls fallen down. Granite countertops
broken in half. Cabinets ripped off the walls. It's complete devastation
in most of these homes that you see behind me. MARK JOHNSSON: I would call this
an engineering disaster simply from the failure to recognize
that this was a hazardous area. That's a great challenge. And it's one things
that geologists need to do whenever
they investigate an area for new development. But clearly, in this
case, in retrospect, we can tell that this
was an unsuitable place to build houses. NARRATOR: This was not the
first time a hillside gave way in Bluebird Canyon. A huge landslide consumed part
of the neighborhood on October 1, 1978, just a few hundred
feet from the 2005 landslide. 24 families lost homes then. Most of the homes
on the Hillside were constructed before
building codes were strict, as they are today. HANNES RICHTER: At
the time these houses were built there
really wasn't any kind of geotechnical analysis
or geologic assessment of stability. They more or less just came
along and graded the flap pad and built their houses. I'm confident that they
didn't know what kind of risks that they were facing. NARRATOR: In August 2005, red
tagged homes were demolished and a massive hillside
reconstruction project began. HANNES RICHTER: We're attacking
this slide stabilization in several phases. First and most important things
we have to do to get the canyon opened up and put in
a storm drain system. And secondly, we're going to be
stabilizing the head scarp area so that we don't lose more
homes and possibly a street up above those homes. We'll be putting in caissons
and tie backs up there. And we'll also be removing
all the homes on the landslide and regrading it to
see all the fissures and try to establish drainage so
that we don't end up with a lot of mud and debris flows. When we're all done
with the repair plan, we will have put back the slope
that was there before, but way better. It will be anchored
into the bedrock like it should have
been in the first place. And we'll have put in
with it proper storm drains that when it rains
hard will collect that runoff and get it underground and away
so that it doesn't saturate the soil and mobilize it again. And it will be a perfectly
safe building site following current building codes today. NARRATOR: The cost
of the repair plan is estimated at over
$10 million to be paid by the state, the
city of Laguna Beach, and Bluebird Canyon residents. Most residents plan to
move back onto the hillside once it's repaired, placing
their faith in the skill of engineers. PAT FUSCOE: When you wonder
whether homes should be built in places like this at all,
when they have discovered these kind of geological
risks, I think the answer still is, yes, carefully, surgically. As far as this disaster goes, it
is a disaster because of a lack of engineering. Had there been
proper engineering before and during the
house construction, this would have been prevented. NARRATOR: While this disaster
came months after the Los Angeles storms, other
engineering disasters occurred during the height of the rains. On February 19, 2005,
after weeks of downpours, rainwater filled a crack
on busy Tujunga Avenue in Sun Valley, California,
a part of Los Angeles. Quickly, the crack expanded. CLARK LEEKLEY: When I
first heard about the hole I was just starting to leave
work on a Saturday morning. And we noticed that the sidewalk
about where it starts right there was starting to cave in. NARRATOR: Within a
few hours, the fissure had turned into a 30 foot long
fault that bisected the road. Initially, the hole measured
about 40 feet in diameter. But the sinkhole kept growing. The rushing water and
falling chunks of roadway crushed a sewer pipe and
severed a power line, turning the roadway
into a virtual river. CLARK LEEKLEY: We
came back on Sunday to help them to fill
it with concrete. It had already caved
in under the street. And it was starting
to go back gradually as it rained more and more. It was raining the hardest I've
ever seen since I worked here. NARRATOR: A neighboring
business provided city workers with 250 cubic yards of concrete
to help fill the sinkhole. CLARK LEEKLEY: We were trying
to pour concrete inside of the piece I was missing. But every time we poured it in,
the water would just wash it away, because the water was
coming so fast and so hard that it didn't have
a chance to stick. NARRATOR: The chasm eventually
swallowed more than 200 feet of pavement. 250,000 cubic yards of soil
would eventually wash away. To make things
worse, Tujunga Avenue was flanked by a
landfill on one side and a sand and gravel pit
the size of a football field on the other. The growing sinkhole
joined the existing pit. At 10:30 PM on
February 20, public works supervisor Rory Shaw was
monitoring his workers as they repaired the sinkhole. Suddenly, the ground he
was standing on caved in. I'm watching him
from the other side. And no more-- all I hear is
this noise and the rumbling of the metal and the
wash and the rapids. CLARK LEEKLEY: The truck was
parked on a piece of the road that was hanging over it. And when it started to
crack and they could they could hear the
road breaking away, he tried to run to the truck. I believe when he got in or
he got up next to the truck, the street just caved in and
the truck fell in the hole. NARRATOR: Rory Shaw died
in a raging torrent, falling victim to a
failure of engineering. Tujunga Avenue had been
built over a dry riverbed without an underground pipe
system or curbside channels to divert rain waters. In Southern California,
dry river or creek beds, called arroyos, are
subject to winter flooding. STEVEN ROSS: A key
point to understand is there is no such thing
as a former river bed. Water continues to
flow into the area. Water simply doesn't
flow on the surface. It has to go somewhere. Or it's going to
percolates through the sand and through the gravel,
whatever else is under there. It will percolate. Or if you having your road a
significant crack, as we often do have in asphalt pavement,
that the water with its energy will be scouring the underlying
bedding through that crack. Once you start at the
crack, that crack now from the edge of
the road will be unzipping that crack upstream to
where the water is coming from. And eventually, you have this
huge, huge, massive hole. NARRATOR: Still, the
placement of Tujunga Avenue is not unique. PIOTR MONCARZ: Well, the
bottom of the canyon, or at least close to the
bottom of the canyon, is always an attractive place
to run a street, run a road. Historically, people did
it for thousands of years. But what needs to be
taken into consideration is the fact that those streets
do become water collector. And that they cannot be left to
their own devices in handling of that water. NARRATOR: Today, the whole
remains, a visible reminder of the damage caused by heavy
rains and lack of drainage on Tujunga Avenue. The city estimates it will
cost up to $100 million to repair the hole and
build a proper flood control infrastructure. That could take years. From 1969 to 2004, Presidential
Disaster Declarations were issued for 60
landslides, 12 of which occurred in California. [music playing] On June 25, 2003, France
celebrated the grand opening of Terminal 2E at Charles
de Gaulle Airport in Paris. However, an
engineering catastrophe would turn jubilation
into mourning before its first anniversary. Terminal 2E was part of a
projected state of the art four terminal hub for Air France. It was being built to handle
up to 17 planes at once and 10 million
passengers a year. Aeroports de Paris, or
ADP, the airport authority for the greater Paris region,
in collaboration with Air France spent almost $1 billion to
build the innovative structure, made to show off French
engineering, skill, and panache. STEVEN ROSS: It's
just a joyous space. And you need a joyous space
when you are coming off the transatlantic
flight at 7:00 AM and you're going to be in the
airport for a few hours waiting for another flight out,
the architecture matters. NARRATOR: A structure
with no interior columns, the futuristic tunnel
was admired by many, including travelers and workers
who arrived at the terminal on May 23, 2004. 11 months after
opening celebrations, suddenly several tons of
concrete, steel, and glass collapsed, as a 98-foot section
of Air France's boarding lounge roof fell in. PIOTR MONCARZ: Its very long,
but it is also huge in span. It's nearly 100 feet wide. The concrete on one side
slid off the support. It fell to the ground. On the other side, the
concrete literally flattens. The roof of the oval
comes to the floor, now sits on the floor, the
huge amount of concrete. Remember, we are talking
1-foot thick concrete. So that's a lot of weight. That's 60 pounds
per square foot. NARRATOR: When the heavy
concrete roof crashed, it killed four people
and injured three others. The collapse astonished many
engineers and designers. Just months before, the
terminal had been praised for its technical prowess. How could it fail? Clues lie in the
startling design. The roof of the boarding lounge
consisted of a concrete vault, pierced with openings to
allow light to pass through, and an exterior metallic
structure on which the glasswork was fixed. Pillars supported the
entire construction. The oval-shaped structure
sat inside a glass shell, where the temperature and
environment were constant. The glass and casing rested
on tensioning cables that kept the oval from bulging out. It's a structure that gets
stronger the more you press on it. And the classic
compression structure that people know
about is an egg. If you think about an
egg, very, very thin shell compared to the size
and weight of the egg. And yet, it's actually
pretty strong. It takes some work
to crack that egg. On the other hand, if
you get an egg that has a crack in it, that
did develop a crack, it's very weak structure. NARRATOR: On this
unusually cold May morning, the terminal's
concrete structure was extremely fragile. Prior to the collapse,
the temperature dropped sharply from 77 degrees
Fahrenheit to just 39 degrees. The cables are
exposed to fluctuating outdoor temperatures that caused
them to expand and contract more than the concrete. On a hot day, the cables
expand and slacken, reducing structural support
and increasing the likelihood that cracks will form. Now, comes an
evening after hot day. The cable suddenly cools down. We know that just
prior to the collapse, there was a massive
drop in temperatures. The cable shortens. What happens when
the cable shortens? It wants to straighten out. It cannot straighten out because
the struts are holding it in the position where it is. The force in the struts is
increasing dramatically. NARRATOR: But the
concrete was designed to handle the extra
force from the struts. PIOTR MONCARZ:
But when you start dealing with those changes
in the forces in the strut that I described to you
related to temperature, related to the concrete
now when it cracks, it becomes much more flexible. So it's no longer
the rigid structure. The strut punches through. The concrete shell loses
its support and goes flat. And that's what happened. NARRATOR: The perfect
egg shell was further compromised by necessary
structural elements of the terminal. STEVEN ROSS: In the
section that collapsed, you have three very large entry
ways right next to one another, three protrusions that
mar the perfect smoothness of the shell. PIOTR MONCARZ: That disturbs
the symmetry of the structure. No longer can the structure
redistribute loads freely. If one area gets slightly
overloaded, you perfect symmetry, it will
shift the load as well. But if you have those sharp
discontinuities, such as a hole cut into it, that's no longer
nice and self-adjusting oval symmetric structure. NARRATOR: In February 2005,
20 months after the collapse, the French Minister of
Transport released the findings of an administrative
investigation. The report stated
that the structure had been slowly deteriorating
since its inauguration in June 2003. STEVEN ROSS: And they
were very, very careful about does spreading blame that,
well, the metal wasn't quite right with the concrete. The foundation
wasn't quite perfect. The design had a few
little problems in it. But almost certainly,
the failure started where the shell
was pierced massively from the side. NARRATOR: In May
2005, ADP announced that it would rebuild the
damaged roof of Terminal 2E. Pierre Graff, President of
ADP, said that the only way to ensure passenger
safety was to replace the entire curved roof shell. The completely
renovated Terminal 2E is slated to reopen
later in the decade and will cost an
estimated $195 million. Terminal 2E was designed
by internationally renowned French architect Paul Andreu. Coincidentally, he also
designed Terminal 3 at Dubai International
Airport, which collapsed during the
construction accident on September 28, 2004. [music playing] On February 12, 1983,
a routine shipping run from Norfolk, Virginia, to
Brayton Point, Massachusetts, turned into a fatal voyage and
one of America's worst maritime disasters. It was a bad storm. The Weather Bureau called it
the worst East Coast storm in 40 years. NARRATOR: The Marine
Electric bulk carrier, similar to this ship,
was transporting more than 24,000 tons of coal. A crew of 34 merchant
mariners were aboard. Most of the crew and officers
considered the Marine Electric a real milk run. They always knew that they were
only 30 miles off the coast, and if something went
wrong, the Coast Guard could come out and get some. NARRATOR: But as the Marina
Electric left the Chesapeake Bay in the early morning
hours of February 11, bad weather off the coast
was setting a fatal scenario in motion. Then, in the dead of
night on February 12, the situation aboard
the coal carrier went from uneasy to desperate. BOB CUSICK: It was about 1:30
when the ship was getting into trouble. The seas, they were breaking,
coming right down the deck, down to number two
and three hatch. We said we were in
very serious trouble. NARRATOR: Her bow was noticeably
heavier as the ocean waves crashed onto the deck. Less than two hours
later, the Marine Electric was listing to starboard and
going down in 29 degree water. So we started to lower the
lifeboat, starboard lifeboat. And just as we were doing that,
the ship capsized right down on its side. In less than a
minute, this happened. The ship made a noise
that one of the officers described like water going
down a drain magnified a billion times. It capsized onto its right
side, trapping many of the men under the ship, spilling
all of them into the ocean. NARRATOR: The entire
crew of 34 men plunged into the frigid
waters with no survival suits. 31 men would die that night. What fatal engineering
flaws caused this disaster? The Marine Electric was a World
War II tanker ship, also known as a T2 tanker. She was nearly 40 years old. They weren't really
designed to last forever. The feeling was you
made about 30 trips. It was going to get torpedoed. Who knew what would happen? ROBERT FRUMP:
After World War II, these ships were used
as commercial vessels and oftentimes converted
to different uses. In the 1970s and the 1960s, it
was common for these vessels to be in effect cut
in half and enlarged by inserting a midsection. NARRATOR: The common term for
this process was jumboize. The Marine Electric was
jumboized by more than 80 feet, making it 605 feet long. Now, of course, you can
probably do this safely if you go back in and examine
the engineering drawings and figure out how to
properly increase the size and where to supplement
the framing of the ship. I think it's fair to
say this was never done. NARRATOR: Yet while jumboizing
probably weakened the Marine Electric, it wasn't the
flaw that sealed her fate. Chief Mate Bob Cusick was
part of the Marine Electric crew for 5 years and a
mariner for over 40 years. Just weeks before the disaster,
he pointed out innumerable weak spots throughout
the ship, including the 40-foot wide
cargo hatch covers. I'd draw up sketches
and exactly where it was, the holes, and submit
them to the captain. He submitted them to
the steamship company. One of those things is
like a Greek tragedy. NARRATOR: The
compromised hatch covers were not properly repaired. We just keep patching them. We'd put duct tape over
them and then some, we called it, red hand,
where it's like Bondo used in a hole in the car. There was over 97
different holes. NARRATOR: Those
cargo hatch covers would doom the Marine Electric. But it would take a legal
battle to reveal the truth. Bob Cusick, Paul
Dewey, and Eugene Kelly were the only survivors of
the marine electric tragedy and led the crusade. A steamship
company has to show that they didn't send the ship
out in unseaworthy condition. It's a big difference
if they know about or they don't know about it. NARRATOR: The bitter battle
started with the victim's families on one side and
Marine Transport Lines, or MTL, the owners of
the Marine Electric and the Coast
Guard on the other. The official marine
board of investigation started the week
after the ship sank. But unlike other
investigations, this one was an investigation that
had actual witnesses who had survived. And in this case,
all three of them abandoned the code
of silence and wanted to tell the true story of how
their comrades died and why. NARRATOR: MTL set out to prove
that the crew and especially Bob Cusick was at
fault for the sinking. It hired the best
underwater divers with the newest
high tech equipment to examine the wreckage. They figured if they
could show that the crew, namely me, where I was the
chief officer, that I had loaded the ship wrong or hadn't secured
the hatches or the anchors or something, they would
have been off the hook. NARRATOR: But it soon became
clear that the crew wasn't at fault. The survivors
of the Marine Electric revealed that
inspections of the ship conducted by both
the Coast Guard and the American
Bureau of Shipping were cursory at best and in
some instances completely false. The investigation now focused
on the weakened hatch covers. Later testimony would show
that the Coast Guard certified that the hatch covers
were of a good quality and of a good strength, when
the hatch covers at that time weren't even on the ship. What Cusick was able
to show on the stand was that the hatch covers
were riddled with holes, that the men were so
afraid of the hatch covers, that they wouldn't walk on
them for fear of falling to their deaths into
the bottom of the ship. They had patched them
and patched the patches. NARRATOR: The pounding
waves had burst through the disintegrating
metal hatch covers and into the number 1
and number 2 cargo holds. Dominic Calicchio, captain
in the US Coast Guard, former merchant marine, and
part of the Marine Investigation Board analyzing the
Marine Electric sinking didn't turn a blind eye. He asked the hard
hitting questions and didn't relent
under pressure. Because of his tenacity,
the final report made an impact well beyond
the Marine Electric case. Essentially, the
report findings said that a great number of
the ships in the American fleet were unsound. The inspections that the Coast
Guard had done were inadequate. And the Board also said that
the American Bureau of Shipping had a conflict of interest
in inspecting these ships, because their fee was, in
fact, paid by the ship owners. NARRATOR: Because of
Calicchio's determination, mandates were created to
improve the shipping industry and prevent similar
loss of life. The legacy of
the Marine Electric is a very positive one. It's loss, arguably
the worst loss in American commercial
maritime history, produced a lot of
very positive changes. Number one, there
were much tougher Coast Guard inspection standards
placed so that these old ships were removed from the water. Secondly, ships that
plied the North Atlantic during the winter had
to carry survival suits. And the third major reform
was the institution of the now famous US Coast Guard
rescue swimmer team that helps people who are in
very cold water who can't help themselves. NARRATOR: In 2001, a
memorial was erected at the Massachusetts
Maritime Academy to the 31 souls who succumbed
to the sea that fateful night. By giving their
lives to the ocean, the crew of the Marine
Electric actually prevented countless others
from suffering the same fate. They left behind a legacy
of reform and justice. The Marine Electric
was not the only T2 tanker to meet a disastrous
fate in frigid waters. On February 18, 1952, two
T2 tankers broke in half and sank off Cape cod when their
high sulfur World War II era steel became brittle and failed
during a severe nor'easter. [music playing] The aviation industry
as we know it today has been shaped by ingenuity,
daring, and disaster. One of the most
influential disasters occurred the morning of March
31, 1931, a Fokker F-10A Trimotor airplane, was on
the field in Kansas City and ready to fly with
eight passengers and crew. It would be their final journey. In fog, ice, and
very low cloud cover, Flight 599 suddenly
took a nosedive and crashed near Bazaar, Kansas. As we came over that hill
right south of us here, we could see the tail
section sticking out right out the middle of
a big pile of rubble. NARRATOR: All aboard the
plane were killed, including one of America's
most beloved heroes, University of Notre Dame
football coach Knute Rockne. To this day he's regarded
perhaps as the greatest college football coach that ever lived. But in his day, he certainly
was the greatest of that breed. NARRATOR: Rockne led the
Catholic University of Notre Dame to three national
championships and five undefeated seasons during
his coaching tenure. They do not justify defeat. Those lads do not feel
sorry for themselves. But they stick in there and
give the best all of themselves until the last whistle blows. NARRATOR: Rockne boarded
the TWA Fokker F-10A at the peak of his popularity. The United States
plunged into mourning when it learned that the
sports legend had died. It didn't take long for
the aeronautics branch of the government to
begin an investigation. ROGER MCCARTHY: It wasn't
investigated in the most rigorous manner,
because let's face it, there wasn't a lot of
experience investigating commercial aircraft. So there's been a huge amount of
speculation about what happened in that crash. When the Federal
Civilian Aircraft Agency attempted to
investigate this crash, they continually bungled it. At that point, when commercial
aviation was getting more prevalent and passengers were
flying and particularly because of the celebrity
status of Knute Rockne, they started looking into why it
crashed so that we can prevent this from happening again. NARRATOR: It had been only 28
years since the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk. The predominant use of aircraft
was for US mail delivery and these planes
frequently crashed. By the late 1920s, new
airplanes had been developed that had more powerful
motors and could accommodate passengers. STEVEN ROSS: The airlines
were just beginning to coalesce in the late 1920s. It was very novel. Remember, it was only in 1927
that Lindbergh flew to Paris from New York. But the technology was
improving literally every month. NARRATOR: The passenger airline
industry had begun to emerge. And one of the most
widely used planes was the Fokker F-10A Trimotor. It was made with a steel body. But it had a wooden wing,
close to 80 feet long. And it was wrapped in a light
painted cotton material. With three Pratt and Whitney
420 horsepower engines, the F-10A flew at a top
speed of 135 miles per hour. Because it had these
three engines and all this horsepower, and because
it had this huge wooden wing, it had a lot of lift. NARRATOR: The wing was
bolted to the fuselage. And the motors were
bolted to maple blocks built into the wing. Anthony Fokker
designed a wooden wing knowing it would be easier
and faster to repair. A metal wing needed
special parts and tools, not so with wood. STEVEN ROSS: This plane is going
to be used all over the world. If it crashes, you've
got to be able to fix it. So you're going to have
a lot more people that are used to dealing with wood. NARRATOR: Unfortunately,
this practical decision would doom the most successful
plane on the market. Sifting through the wreckage in
the middle of the empty Kansas field, experts in
the investigation proposed a number of different
theories for what happened. The propeller was
broken loose by ice, the pilot flew it into
the ground, in a spiral, it over sped, there were all
sorts of excuses being offered, none of them the result
of good investigatory work of the crash. NARRATOR: On May 4, 1931,
nearly a month after the crash, the government banned passengers
from flying in Fokker F-10s, all the while claiming
there was nothing inherently wrong with a Fokker aircraft. Finally, the investigators
identified the probable cause of the crash-- part of the wooden wing had
broken off in mid-flight. EASTER HEATHMAN: It
came fluttering down, much like a piece of paper,
30 seconds to a minute after the plane hit
the ground over here. NARRATOR: The Fokker wing was
comprised of wooden joints that were glued together. If the wood gets wet with
rain or there's moisture that accumulates inside the
wing, it tends to separate, and the glue joints
start coming apart. And that is one of the things
that they feel happened with this airplane. So it doesn't have
to rot to come apart. It just has to swell in a way
that the glue cannot tolerate and you break up the wing and
you still lose the structural integrity. NARRATOR: The decision
to make a wooden wing was a practical one for repairs. But in reality, such
thorough maintenance for the growing fleet of planes
and routes was impractical. The government and TWA,
who owned the vast majority of the Fokker F-10A airplanes,
weathered the disaster with little fallout. However, Anthony Fokker
and his airplanes in the US were virtually done in. Soon, the entire
fleet of F10 planes was disassembled and burned. No one wanted to fly in them. And new regulations
for inspections were too costly to consider. With a loss of
Fokker and his fleet, however, the race was on
to engineer a new plane. Well, if Knute Rockne
had never crashed, would we still be flying around
in wood Fokker Trimotors? I don't think so. But the market would have
evolved very differently. Disaster tends to spur
technological innovation. NARRATOR: In the aftermath
of the Rockne crash, Jack Frye, the owner of TWA,
contracted Donald Douglas to build a new, bigger
and better plane. This was the dawn of
the DC-3, the plane that many believe was one of
the best passenger planes ever made. In 1926, fewer than
6,000 passengers flew on commercial flights. By 1930, the number had jumped
to approximately 400,000 passengers. [music playing] The Walt Disney Concert Hall
opened on October 23, 2003, in Los Angeles. It was lauded in
the world's press as one of the most beautiful,
dramatic, and innovative structures ever built. The new Disney Concert
Hall in LA is truly a modern architectural masterpiece, in
the sense it's a very free-form structure, whose skin
is stainless steel. NARRATOR: But there was a
small, hard dose of reality in this fantasy land. Embedded in the graceful
curves of shining metal was a tiny engineering disaster. Superstar architect Frank
Gehry designed this new home for the Los Angeles
Philharmonic Orchestra. The Disney Concert Hall is part
of the Music Center Complex, owned by Los Angeles County. Gehry fashioned the wavy,
stainless steel exterior to look like a ship
with its sales at full mast, a symbolic
ceremonial barge to music. He wanted the structure to
reflect light in different ways and so it would be a
more interesting shape. NARRATOR: Although
some criticized the ambitious design, everyone
praised the acoustics. However, the
sail-like designs that reflected sound so
beautifully on the interior, caused reflections
of a different kind on the hall's
steel-clad exterior. Most of the
Disney Concert Hall has a skin that is
stainless steel. The brushed portions
of the building tend to diffuse the
beamed sunlight. The catch is that
with the Disney, there are some surfaces that
are polished stainless steel. And they reflect very
exactly the sunlight. NARRATOR: Two areas on
the building featured polished stainless steel-- the roof of the founders
room and the marquee above the adjoining
Redcat Theater. Although these reflective
areas only made up about 2% of the building's skin,
they caused positively sizzling problems. Sections of the
wall are concave. So they focus the sun the
same way a parabolic mirror would focus the sun. And so instead of having
just the intensity of the sun reflecting back at you, you
might have the intensity of 20 suns reflecting into
your window all at once. And that's severe. NARRATOR: Nearby condominium
residents got a blistering dose of this focused sunlight. Certain residents were unable
to use their own living rooms because of the heat. And their air conditioning
bills skyrocketed. A flat panel like this, the
light will come in and just like a mirror will
go out parallel. You'll see the image. If you're standing
over here, you'll see the image of the
sun, for example. If we imagined that this were
curved, then what would happen is all of that light gets
focused into some point in front of this. If it's a very tight curve,
the point is very close. If it's a very flat, open curve,
the point is very far away. NARRATOR: Not only did adjacent
structures get overheated, the physical space around the
concert hall was heating up to. You had measurements
being made on the sidewalk of 142 degrees. If the heat wasn't bad enough,
certain traffic intersections were precariously close to
receiving a blinding glare, which could have proven deadly
for pedestrians crossing the street. The county responded
immediately. If you're going to cure the
solar concentration problem, you have one or two choices. You can change geometry of the
mirror or destroy the mirror. NARRATOR: A computer models
simulated the shifting position of the sun at half
hour intervals over a 365-day period. This study determined which
stainless steel panels were the worst offenders based
on time of day and season. LA-based Schiller and
Associates conducted the study and assisted Gehry in
exploring different remedies to the problem. What we did was we
tested different solutions. We just used one of the
panels from the building and put different films on them. And we tested each
of the surfaces to see what the different
specularity would be. And some of the surfaces
were a big aesthetic change may have solved the problem
but would have been a wildly different building. I don't know whether you can
see the difference in the way that the different
surfaces reflect. You can see that there
are certain moments when the focal point passes
right through your eye. NARRATOR: In March 2005,
the sails on the Disney Hall lost a little of their
luster when work crews began sanding the problematic panels. The best solution,
the one that had the least aesthetic impact,
but still was sufficient, was to sand the surface. We found that a combination of
straight vibrational sanding followed by orbital sanding
took care of the specularity. NARRATOR: It took
six weeks and $60,000 to complete the process. Mission accomplished--
heat and glare dissipated. Most people cannot tell
that it's been treated. Those who do, I think, seem
to find it interesting. NARRATOR: This engineering
disaster may have been minor. But with modern building
materials and a growing desire to push the
architectural envelope, new dangers could be right
around the next curving corner. The heat island
effect is something that goes on in cities now. In fact, cities now
are so crowded full of inanimate surfaces, that when
the sun shines, they get hot. Now, this actually means
that the air in the city starts to rise. And you actually get sort of air
pulled in from around the city, which helps a tiny bit. But it's also an indicator that
the city has overheated itself. NARRATOR: But for today,
the Walt Disney Concert Hall stands gracefully in
all of its dulled glory. [music playing]
