- [Narrator] Countries around the world have pumped millions and
even billions of dollars into huge construction projects
that make our lives better. But some megaprojects should have been thrown in the garbage at the planning stage. So grab a hard hat and a hi-vis jacket. We've got megaprojects, mega-prospects, and something a little
unstable to look at. Ouch! All right, it's time to check out the most useless
megaprojects in the world. (upbeat music) Road to Nowhere. Hawaii is a beautiful place. It's got beaches, grass
skirts, coconut bras, oh, and this super expensive
blight on the landscape, the H-3 Interstate. Now I know what you're
thinking. Interstate, Hawaii? Well, that's one big highway. Well, here's the thing, it doesn't connect to any other state. The name just means it's been funded by the federal government. So rather than spanning 2,500 miles to the nearest state, California it spans just 15 from
northwest of downtown Honolulu to the Marine Corps Base Hawaii. Oh, even so it still cost a
colossal $1.3 billion to build or $80 million a mile, geez. Well, back in 1960 when the
road was first authorized, people weren't happy. Not only was it set to
level a vast number of trees but there were also sacred temples and funerary mounds in the area that were super significant
to native Hawaiians. And because of this,
people protested, hard. But constructors eventually
got legal authorization anyway and in 1989, they started building. Seven contractors and eight years later, it finally opened in 1997. So despite H-3 taking 37 years and blowing the budget
by a shocking amount, are Hawaiians happy? Not at all. Construction destroyed
many of the sacred sites throughout the valley. Now lots of people won't
drive anywhere near the road for fear of being cursed by the dead so it's hardly even used. Now, if you were thinking
of taking a smooth cruise through the Hawaiian countryside then best be checking your
back seat before you set off. (narrator screaming) That's a real highway to hell. (screen whooshing) Dam Bursters. Man, all this talking can be thirsty work. Sometimes I wish I had a giant reservoir to serve all my hydration needs. Well, the city of Los Angeles
faced the same problem in the 1900s though it wasn't because they all talked too much. They needed a reliable water reserve for the growing needs of the city. So they hired self-taught civil
engineer, William Mulholland to set about designing and building the largest arch-supported
dam in the world. Construction started in 1924 and was finished
suspiciously quickly in 1926. Located in San Francisco Canyon about 40 miles outside of downtown LA, the completed St. Francis Dam was over 700 feet long and 185 feet tall, big enough to hold more than
12 billion gallons of water. That's over 18,000 Olympic swimming pools. However, as it began to fill the cracks in self-taught
Mulholland's experience started showing, very literally. Several leaks began appearing, which the engineer
dismissed as totally normal. But in reality, the foundations of the dam were woefully unsuitable for supporting such a
huge weight of water. On March 12th, 1928 only five days after the
reservoir reached max capacity, the giant concrete wall collapsed sending all 12 billion gallons of water hurtling towards the Pacific Ocean. After just five minutes the 120 foot wave had violently careened
one and a half miles from the collapsed wall
destroying everything in its path. It went down as one of the
worst engineering catastrophes in US history, destroying 1,000 homes and leaving at least 431 people
sleeping with the fishes. Although he was relieved
of any wrongdoing, Mulholland never worked again. All I can say is dam. (screen whooshing) Ceased City. (narrator yawning) Man, I didn't sleep too good last night. My neighbor was jumping up and
down on their bed for hours. If only I lived somewhere
quiet, alone and all by myself. Actually, I think I know just the place. Xiangyun International Project
is a 1,800 acre development in Shijiazhuang, China,
and it's completely empty. Over the course of several years developers splashed a monstrous $3 billion on creating a new high-end
residential super community. But when the construction
company's CEO was arrested in 2014 for bribing state officials,
the company fell into crisis and incurred billions of dollars in debt. They were forced to declare bankruptcy and Xiangyun was seized by the government leaving thousands who'd
already bought properties there seriously out of pocket. Now, the huge city is eerily
empty, like a ghost town. And though European styled
building and statues might look great from the outside, the inside tells a different story. I mean, just look at this mall. One company has expressed interest in taking the failed city over, but it's gonna take some really big bucks to save this place. It's a shame. If it had worked out it'd be a pretty awesome place to live. I know an even more awesome place, though, my YouTube channel. Hit those like and subscribe buttons and you'll never miss one of
my incredible videos again. All right, let's get back to it. (screen whooshing) Delta Skelter. I hate sitting in traffic. Someone needs to hurry up
and invent a teleporter so I never get stuck
during rush hour again. Well, China might have
made the next best thing, the keyword being might have. The HZMB bridge system has
reduced the transportation time between three of the world's
most populous cities, Hong Kong, Zhuhai, and Macau, from four hours to just 30 minutes. It's the longest sea crossing in the world at over 34 miles long, meaning it could stretch the
entire width of Los Angeles and still have bridge to spare, wowsers. So what's the catch? Well, considering the whole thing cost a gargantuan $18.8 billion, you'd imagine it'd be put to good use but hardly anyone actually drives down it. You need a crossing permit and it's almost impossible to obtain one. Hmm. Weird. Only high tech investors, top academics, politicians or philanthropists are even considered for the permits and your vehicle must be
registered in all three cities. Even then, the daily limit
for applicants is only 400. That's hella stingy! It seems like they're
doing everything they can to stop people crossing. Some people reckon that because of Hong
Kong's overcrowding problem they're trying to limit
traffic flow into the city. But if that's the case,
why spend nine years and almost $19 billion building this thing just to stop people from using it? Something seems suspicious to me. What do you think? Let me know down in the comments below. (screen whooshing) Quit horsin' around. Ever dreamed of having a giant statue built of you when you die? Mr. Bartholomew Egbert Amazed, maker of YouTube's finest videos. Yeah, I like the sound of that. Well, one statue in Custer
County, South Dakota takes this concept to the extreme. Back in 1877, native American
war hero, Crazy Horse led the Lakota people into battle to protect native territory
from the federal government, but was fatally wounded. 62 years later in 1939, Lakota
chief, Henry Standing Bear commissioned Polish American
sculptor, Korczak Ziolkowski who'd previously worked
on nearby Mount Rushmore to carve the hero's likeness
into Thunderhead Mountain. With those credentials,
what could go wrong, right? Well, Korczak's original plans were for the statue to be 641
feet long and 563 feet tall overtaking the entire mountain
and looking a lot like this. Jump to present day and
here's what we actually got. The face is the only
part that's been finished and that wasn't completed until 1998, 50 years after Korczak started, and there's been practically
no progress since. Though Korczak himself worked tirelessly to try to complete it, after his passing his family took the baton and they were less than enthusiastic. Despite raking in millions
of dollars in donations and tourist fees from
the incomplete monument, they've added very little to it. Even worse, Thunderhead Mountain
was a sacred burial ground. Destroying the land Crazy
Horse died protecting goes against everything he stood for. The Lakota people seem
to have been left behind for an egotistical money-making
project by the Ziolkowskis, and that's really messed up. But let me know what you think
down in the comments below. (screen whooshing) Silent Stadium. With 3.5 billion
supporters around the world it's safe to say soccer is the
most popular sport on earth. So in 2014, when Brazil hosted
the prestigious World Cup they set about building
a bunch of new stadiums to impress all the global spectators. But one stadium left fans
scratching their heads. In the city of Manaus in
the Amazon Rainforest, the aptly named Arena De Amazonia might be the worst location for
a giant soccer stadium ever. See, there's no roads
from Manaus to the coast and that was where the building
supplies were delivered. So all the materials had to be
shipped up the Amazon River, which was a super expensive journey. Then during construction the blazing hot rainforest temperatures proved too much for
the grass on the pitch, which turned brown and died. At this, event organizers
took to painting it green. Not exactly what you'd expect
from a $300 million stadium but its post World Cup life
has proven even more miserable. See, the most successful
team in Manaus, Nacional are all the way down in the
fifth tier of Brazilian soccer. So whilst they have taken
the stadium as their own audience attendance
rarely hits over 3,000, a tiny fraction of the
44,300 total capacity. They literally have no fans. - You've got no friends! - [Narrator] Aside from the occasional Christian concert held there the place remains pretty empty. And sadly, I think even the
big man upstairs would say, it's a complete waste. (screen whooshing) Mechs You Wonder. The robotics race has really
ramped up in recent years. We've had the good, the bad,
and the downright weird. But this Giant Gundam
suit in Yokohama, Japan, might be one of the most
ridiculous of them all. Based on the RX-78-2 mech suit from the popular "Gundam anime" series, this to-scale model is a
tremendous 59 feet tall. Now, I'm not saying getting a 25-ton robot the size of three giraffes
to move is an easy feat. However, I wouldn't rely on this Gundam to protect Earth from any alien invasions like the ones from the show. Aside from taking a
few short steps forward and bending down on one
knee like a sluggish grandma it doesn't really do a lot. It's just a big shiny tourist attraction. So if you're not that into Gundam it does seem pretty pointless. Whilst the official price
hasn't been revealed a similar size statue in
Tokyo cost around $100,000 but that can only move its head, whereas the Yokohama Gundam
can move its entire body and that means a much bigger price tag. I don't know, it's not
really doing it for me, but hey, the fans seem
happy so who am I to judge? (screen whooshing) You're Gonna Pay. Whether you love or hate
ex-president Donald Trump, there's no denying that
one particular policy from back in his initial 2016 election didn't exactly turn out as he'd promised. You know, reinforcing the border wall between the US and Mexico. The new wall was supposed to be made of 1,000 miles of big, beautiful concrete, and Mexico was going to cover the whopping 8 to $12 billion invoice. Well, it's not exactly gone to plan. So far the border wall
is only 450 miles long, less than half of what was promised, and only 47 miles of that is actually new. The rest of it is just the previous wall bolstered with steel
bollard's, which as you can see isn't that great at keeping people out. Man, he didn't even break a sweat. But if you're not the best
climber, hey, don't worry. There's some nice low parts that you can just hop right over. Off she goes into the land of the free. Some of the new parts were made so badly you just need to wait until
they fall over, jheez. So far this ludicrous project has cost an outrageous $15 billion. That's almost 320 million
per new mile built. Plus some estimates say the
yearly maintenance costs could be up to $28 billion. And as for Mexico fronting the bill, well they haven't coughed up a dime. It's all been covered by the taxpayers. Man, sounds like the time
my date ordered $150 steak then realized that she'd left
her purse, so I had to pay. Ha ha. Oh, she's so silly. (screen whooshing) Hour of Power. If I'm procrastinating, I do 15 minutes of work
max before I get bored. But I've got nothing on the failures of Monju nuclear power station,
in Japan's Fukui Prefecture. Since getting the go ahead in 1983 it's only produced one
measly hour of power, one hour in several decades. I take longer to wake up every morning. Monju is a prototype fast-breeder reactor. By jiggling the reaction process the creators had hoped the plant would recycle used nuclear
fuel to create even more energy making production way more efficient, which sounds great on paper, except it turned out to
be anything but efficient. Major faults were discovered
in 14,000 individual components some controlling critical
safety features of the station. Yikes! In 1995, a fire broke out which staff tried to hide by
editing the security footage. Double yikes! And in 2010, a 3.3 ton refueling machine fell into the reactor
vessel and got so busted up it wouldn't fit back through the top. Man, what a comedy of errors. Yet somehow, the plant limped on. In 2011 though, nuclear
disasters struck Fukushima when a tsunami hit the
Fukushima nuclear power station and caused a radiation leak. After that public opinion turned firmly against nuclear
power, especially Monju, which by that point had
devoured almost $12 billion of government spending with
nothing to show for it. Five years later in 2016
it was closed for good and authorized for deconstruction. But guess what? That's going to take until 2047 and cost another $3.4 billion. So all in all this has
been a shameful $15 billion 60 year demonstration of
how not to make something. Oh, and if you were wondering
where the name Monju came from it was named after the Buddhist
Deity of Wisdom, the irony. (screen whooshing) Coastland Ghostland. Recently, I've been trying to live a little more sustainably. I recycle, donate stuff and I've stopped making
petrol fires in my backyard. But some countries like Malaysia have struggled implementing
environmental changes. Announced in 2006, Malaysia's Forest City was meant to be an incredible
role model of future cities consisting of four artificial islands off the coastal wetlands of Johor. Concept pictures showed beautiful
towers draped with plants, carless roads, and smart
technology apartments that could maintain your
home with no intervention. But since the grand opening in 2016 things haven't exactly taken off. By 2019, only 15,000 units had been sold, embarrassingly short of
their target of 700,000. And as few as 500 people
actually lived there. Awkward. See, the Chinese developers
targeted the project almost exclusively
towards upper middle class Chinese citizens as a
place to store their wealth outside of China. But this collapsed when
the Chinese government introduced a yearly spending
cap of $50,000 on purchases made outside the country. Couple that with COVID and Malaysia having a political crisis and
you're left with a ghost town struggling for buyers. With the most basic studio apartment costing almost $100,000 and
the average Malaysian salary being less than $11,000, there's no chance of
the locals affording it. Well, that's not all. Despite being touted
as an ecological marvel its construction has
caused irreversible damage to the protected wetlands
off the coast of Malaysia. Yikes! Now, you can't put a
price on the environment but you can put a price
on this hunk of metal and that's a ridiculous
hundred billion dollars. Oh man, I feel woozy. The only residents are these tacky plastic
animals everywhere. I'm not surprised no
one wants to live here. It gives me the heebie-jeebies. (screen whooshing) Block Flop. Buying your first house
is a stressful experience full of highs and lows. But if your first property was the Lotus Riverside
Project in Shanghai, it had just have been one monumental low. On June 27th, 2009, one of the
11 13-story apartment blocks collapsed completely onto its side. Fortunately, no one was
living there at the time, but sadly, one unlucky worker was inside collecting his tools when
the building gave way. They'd been digging a pit to
create an underground garage below the south side
of the apartment block and piling all the excavated
dirt on the north side. But the huge heavy mound of dirt shifted the structure of the soil putting loads of extra pressure
on the concrete foundations and these were vital for
supporting the building from below. Unable to tolerate this
increase in pressure, they snapped and the whole
building toppled over. Miraculously the 10 other
blocks were undamaged but can you imagine a domino
rally that could have happened? Well, 400 owners of the
other apartments could, as they demanded their
money back right away. As a result, the developers had to pay out almost $2 million in damages and got hit with almost 3
million for the cleanup. Phew, that might be the
costliest pile of dirt I've ever heard. (screen whooshing) Costa Fortune. In the words of one of my favorite poets, "I like big boats and I cannot lie." That was M.C. Harbor. What a guy, eh? Well, this boat here is
absolutely giant, or was giant. This is the Costa
Concordia, a 114,000 ton, 950 foot long mega cruiser
capable of carrying over 4,000 people. This enormous ship went
into service in 2006 and cost a whopping $570 million, but it hardly lasted six years. On the last leg of a cruise around the Mediterranean in 2012, it struck a rock near Tuscany, Italy and partially capsized. Captain Francesco Schettino had deviated from the planned course to perform a sail-by salute, where a ship is brought close to shore to salute those on land. Confident enough he could
navigate the area by eye, Schettino had turned off the ship's computer navigation system before performing the maneuver. Big mistake! Less than 1,000 feet from the shore he suddenly noticed dangerous
waves breaking on the reef and ordered the ship to turn. By then, however, it was too late. The ship turned all right and crashed straight into an
uncharted rock in the seabed. Despite the best efforts
of the rescue team 34 people never made it back to shore. As well as the tragic losses it took over two years for the ship to be refloated and towed
almost 200 miles to Genoa where it was torn apart and scrapped. The entire cost of the
cleanup and scrapping plus the compensation
payouts for the victims came to around $2 billion. You could buy nearly
four new boats for that. Whoa, Costa Concordia? More
like cost a flipping fortune! (screen whooshing) The Big Stink. For architect, Thomas Willson living in 1820s London was tough not because of the food or the weather, but because of all the bodies piling up with nowhere to bury them, ewww. See, from 1770, London had
a massive industrial boom. So, many people relocated
to the city for work but more people eventually
means more bodies to bury and allocating enough graveyard space to accommodate all of them was overlooked. Until that is, Willson came up with a seriously metal solution to
London's corpse-y conundrum. - [Willson] A giant pyramid of death. - [Narrator] By building
up, Willson theorized you could condense 1,000 acres of traditional graveyard
space into just 18 acres, capable of storing 5 million bodies. He planned a sepulchre, sorry. - [Willson] A giant pyramid of death. - [Narrator] 90 stories tall. London's tallest building,
The Shard is 95 stories tall or just over a thousand feet so this pyramid would've been colossal. Each side would be covered in dark granite with stairs leading to an
observatory at the top. Unfortunately, at $789
million in today's money the crazy scheme proved too dear, plus Londoners were understandably against having a nightmarish pyramid of bodies towering over their city. So instead, the city privatized land specifically for traditional graveyards. Boring! Still, I get it. 5 million bodies ain't
gonna smell so great. The big smoke would've been
more like the big stink. (screen whooshing) Capital Corruption. This year, I'm gonna travel more. I wanna eat good food, meet new people and see some cool cities. But one place I won't be going is the capital city of Naypyitaw, Myanmar. Despite being eight times
bigger than New York, Naypyitaw has less than one
eighth of New York's population. Woo. So where'd they all go? Well, they were never there. What? Naypyitaw only became the capitol in 2005 after Myanmar's military
government became paranoid that the previous capitol, Yangon was going to be attacked from the sea. And sure, Naypyitaw is more central but it's also a far less
desirable place to live. Even though it covers
almost 3,000 square miles there's only one high
school, very few shops and almost no public transport. What's more, most businesses are still located in the
previous capital city. So unsurprisingly, people
don't want to relocate. As such, this 20 lane highway
is almost always eerily empty like something outta "Silent Hill." It's pretty obvious who this city was really made for though. And there might be no public facilities but there is a 100 room
presidential palace and a 31-building parliamentary complex. Hmm. The whole place cost a
heartbreaking $4 billion too, about 5% of all the money
Myanmar makes in a year. The public essentially funded something utterly useless to
them so the corrupt government can hold onto their dictatorial power. So simply put, you won't be catching me touristing in Naypyitaw. (screen whooshing) Challenging Times. It's crazy to think that nowadays
if you've got enough money you can literally fly off into space. But our journey to conquer the cosmos has had some major hitches along the way. Back in 1986, NASA's Challenger
shuttle took off for space. Just 73 seconds later
though it broke apart and set completely aflame. Sadly, all seven crew
members went down with it. The shuttle was intended to
have a lifespan of 10 years. However, Challenger
had only been in action for a measly three. So what the heck happened? Well, O-rings in the right-hand rocket booster malfunctioned. These are small rubber rings that create a tight seal to
contain all the immense pressure that's produced when burning rocket fuel. But freezing temperatures on
launch day stiffened the rubber preventing the seal from forming properly. Because of this when the rocket took off flames burned through the booster wall and prized it away from
the external fuel tank. This ruptured the tank,
spilling highly flammable liquid hydrogen and
liquid oxygen everywhere and setting the entire shuttle alight. To add insult to injury, engineers at NASA had flagged up flaws in the
rocket boosters as early as 1977 as well as the dangers of
launching in cold conditions. However, their concerns were ignored and the shuttle was allowed to fly, oof. Because of this, the space shuttle program was put on hold for the next
three years, and rightfully so. In today's money, Challenger's building plus the money used in
the wake of the disaster would cost a whopping
$15 billion in total. Now, I'm sure plenty
of lessons were learned from this terrible
tragedy but holy Jupiter, that's one expensive error. (upbeat music) Phew, we made it and I
wouldn't trust these guys to make a sandwich let
alone build anything. So which of those
megaprojects do you think should have been a mega-reject? Let me know down in the comments below and thanks for watching. (gentle music)
