Sweden Stadium Collapse Chaos - Massive Engineering Mistakes - Engineering Documentary

in New York a construction crane comes crashing down onto a landmark Bridge there was enough Dynamic energy released that the entire crane essentially fell on its back tragedy strikes a Titanic TV tower in Texas oh my God that scared me to death cuz we can't outrun 2,000 ft of tower catastrophe takes out Boston's water supply the power of water is immense and you can see why it was a huge disaster at the time and in Sweden Bruce Springsteen fans nearly bring the house down you can see the roof bouncing it was crazy with big builds even the smallest mistake can be a huge disaster from miscalculations to misunderstandings some with deadly consequences these catastrophes are every engineer's worst [Music] nightmare big engineering requires colossal machines to get the job done but if things go wrong the catastrophe like the equipment can be massive like this disaster in New York state on a vital Hudson River Crossing this humongous crane going across two Bridges it's a frightening experience a catastrophic collapse that caught everyone by surprise I was in shock I was not expecting this to happen a very lucky Escape for both workers and drivers a collapse of this nature over an active roadway this is one in a [Music] [Applause] [Music] million New York City with over 8 million residents is the most populated city in the US the five burrowers sit at the mouth of the mighty Hudson River one of the largest natural Harbors on earth a Adan buuga is a professor of civil engineering we are a few miles up from New York City on the Hudson River that has been a Powerhouse of Transport since the colonial times this river is really the river that made New York City what it is today with so much water to navigate around bridges are a fact of life New York City is carved up by water and Manhattan alone has 21 Crossings some of them the most famous in the country but crossing the Hudson is no easy feat what makes this River really unique is that it transects the entire State this river is actually incredibly wide it presents a significant challenge when it comes to Building Bridges since the 1950s anyone heading over the Hudson North of New York City crossed over this the near 5 km long tapenz bridge but after 5 decades it was struggling the original tapenz Bridge was built in 1955 when traffic was much lighter by the turn of the century around 140,000 Vehicles were crossing it every day and it simply couldn't cope the need for a new bridge was recognized for decades and the main goal was not just to replace an aging structure but also to increase the capacity opening to traffic in 2018 the Epic New tapanzee Bridge cost nearly $4 billion its twin spans now carry around 50 million Vehicles a year if you look at the structure you'll see that it's not really one Bridge it's actually two Bridges they're almost identical but we have two spans one for the Eastbound and one for westbound traffic that are essentially what we call statically Independent each Bridge has 43 peers 41 of which are anchored to the bottom of the very wide and very deep River the only way to create solid foundations for the huge bridge to carry immense loads was to drive hundreds of Steel piles deep into the Bedrock driving piles through more than 30 m of mud and Clay all the way to firm foundations called for a massive crawler crane with an enormous Hammer you had this absolutely enormous crane and this vibratory hammer which is this big block of steel that shakes the entire thing vigorously they actually use this and the selfweight of that whole system to just push the pile into the mud the hammer keeps a tight grip on the pile with what's known as jaw plates as it vibrates the whole system works with gravity to drive the pile downwards these cranes are serious pieces of Hardware the boom on this thing is almost as tall as the Statue of Liberty and they're capable of lifting around 300 tons freelance photographer David Rocco wanted to immortalize this mighty construction on film it was just fascinating to have this right in your own backyard now was just out there watching the project day by day you know waiting for those moments to get the right shots but the most incredible images that David captured would be memorable for all the wrong reasons Tuesday July the 19th 2016 the crawler crane was positioned on the newly constructed westbound span driving piles for one of the eastbound Piers the pier would stand on 14 steel piles 3 ft in diameter driven deep down into the Bedrock three piles had already been successfully placed Diana Cortez from the occupational safety and health administration knows the story they were in the process of driving the next pile with the vibratory hammer during the fourth pile as they were driving it it went off Plum so essentially it was driving crooked the crane operator attempted to lift the pile but he was having trouble getting it all all the way out of the mud right around noon disaster struck with traffic moving in both directions the massive metal boom crashed down onto the old [Music] Crossing David Rocco got word that something was very wrong I got a Beat from somebody on my cell phone that said cran collapsed on the uh tapy bridge and I said oh wow David chartered a helicopter and began capturing the catastrophe on camera we shot straight across in the helicop that got there in less than 10 minutes and I was going to be on top of it literally you know, 1500 ft above it from his Bird's ey view the scale of the devastation was clear it's just remarkable to look down there and this humongous crane going across two Bridges and hanging over the other side that's a sight I'm never going to forget tons of steel were lying across the bridge with traffic at a complete standstill oser official Diana Cortez was in her office when news of the disaster broke when I first heard about the crane collapse I was in shock I was like oh my God looking at the at the boom actually across the road and the traffic jam the people out of their cars it was quite a scene it was actually horrific to say the least despite Devastation This Disaster had narrowly avoided turning into tragedy the boom fell totally across the tapen bridge it didn't hit not one vehicle so it it it was a miracle a collapse of this nature over an active roadway with no major injuries and no fatalities this is sort of a one in a million this is actually quite amazing that nobody was hurt even the crane operator though he probably got the shock of his life escaped unharmed in the immediate aftermath of the disaster the big question was what had caused this gigantic crane to collapse Diana Cortez LED OSHA's investigation as the area director I immediately sent a team to initiate an investigation also eventually to make some recommendations to prevent Rec C attention quickly turned to the vibratory hammer which had successfully driven three piles on this pier but with the fourth pile things didn't go as planned after 3 minutes of driving the pile became stuck at an angle now what happened at that point in an effort to try to free the pile instead of just winching up he actually pushed the boom of the crane up and the vibratory Hammer that was holding on to the pile with essentially a set of Jaws ripped free and this is where things went horribly bad this caused the boom to recoil in the upward position and then when it came down it caused the boom to structurally fail because of the sudden jolt and collapse and fall right onto the tampen bridge investigators needed to determine whether force or failure had caused the hammer to rip loose so the evidence was salvaged from the riverbed after it was pulled back out of the Hudson they found that the Jaws which look very much like jaws of you know an animal that grab the pile the bearing plate on those essentially the teeth was actually a flat bearing plate this is partially why this jaw ripped loose with the teeth corroded closed the flat back of the bearing plate had been gripping the pile the bearing bearing plates secure the vibratory hammer one of the bearing plates was missing some of its Jagged teeth and also what was found was that the bearing plate was corroded ultimately the lack of teeth combined with corrosion meant the Jaws lost their grip triggering this catastrophe on one of the state's key [Music] Bridges after the disaster the wreckage was cleared and just 6 hours later this vital Crossing was partly reopened aside from a few buckled railings neither Bridge suffered any real damage of course this is a enormous crane that collapsed onto this bridge and the impact was significant and terrifying but in the end this is major civil infrastructure that is built for the ages and that is built to absorb gargantuan forces so even with this crane collapsing on a brand new bridge the Bridge suffered essentially no damage the disaster only set the project back a few days and on September 11th 2018 both spans of the new Crossing were fully opened this is a lesson on every project every piece of equipment needs to be in perfect working order while it might cost time ultimately it can prevent catastrophe in big Eng engineering every project brings unique challenges but even a small change in plan can lead to catastrophe like this disaster in Texas a devastating collapse of a supersized structure a TV Tower taller than the Empire State Building Came Crashing Down to Earth miscalculations that led to destruction on an epic scale people said okay we got problems here it's that last piece that got them it took 30 to 40 seconds for the entire Tower to fall which seemed like a lifetime the obvious question what had gone so badly [Music] wrong Houston Texas has long been one of America's fastest growing cities in the 70 oil was driving the boom and downtown the skyline was soaring too back then America's favorite pastime was watching TV and it still is today but all those huge buildings popping up in downtown Houston were causing havoc on TV and radio [Music] signals The Only Solution in true Texas style was to build bigger transmission towers this site Southwest of Houston houses some of the tallest structures in the US like the senior road Tower standing at a jaw dropping 600 [Music] M former broadcast engineer Bill Cordell oversaw the tower's construction building a structure of this height 2,000 ft or in that area comes with real unique challenges in the fact that you have to have special rigging you have to have special people that have that know their business otherwise you can get yourself in trouble cuz those are big boy Towers most TV towers are constructed using a tried and true method the cable and pulley system hoisting each section before rotating it into place at the top of the tower despite reaching higher than nearly every skyscraper on Earth the tower stands on a base just 45 cm wide this is the uh senior road Tower base itself can you imagine having 982 tons on 18 in the amount of compression at this point you know as an engineer is staggering it's staggering but here it is keeping the tower Standing Tall demands serious ious support Lee Lowry is a senior professor of civil engineering after they get a certain height they can't just stand on their own feet you have to have some guy wires some wires holding them in position to the ground more than 20 steel guy wires defy the forces of gravity and strong winds to keep the tower standing vertical the top guy weighs 10 tons a piece so you have three guy wires that weigh 10 tons that are pulling on the tower just from the sheer weight and then you tension them well you have to do it very carefully or you'll pull the tower down in a tower of this magnitude you have to be very careful these towers are extremely vast and highly tensioned pieces of engineering but they're just the support act it's all about getting the antenna as high as possible for maximum signal range the antenna is like the Crown Jewel it has to be a built and handled with special care it's a very pristine thing a very slow process to get the antenna in place and then test it afterwards and crucial to transmitting as far and wide as possible are these known as microwave baskets those baskets are part of the antenna and they stick out from the tower pretty far 2 or 3 ft that point out towards the horizon microwave baskets send out those all important signals between the transmitter and the receiver in this case the tower and your home completed in December 1983 it began broadcasting nine radio and three TV stations to homes across the city but this is the second tower on this site its predecessor met a tragic end December the 7th 1982 the final 18 M tall antenna section for the original tower was being hoisted into [Music] place broadcast engineer Bill Cordell asked a colleague to record this crowning achievement had Andy good friend of mine and engineer that I've known for many many years he was very good at filming well I had him in the back of my truck looking straight up five workers were on the tower to secure the final piece it was supposed to be the cherry on top of the cake so to speak cuz once they put the antenna in place and bolted it in we were practically done instead with the antenna more than 300 M up in the air what Andy captured was the stuff of nightmares oh my God and it never says anything bad I heard him that day say oh my God that scared me to death and you feel very helpless they were young men that were 1,700 ft in the air and you knew what was going to happen then the falling antenna severed one of the guy wires holding the rest of the tower in place the antenna hit the the guywire over here and was sliding down the guywire as it slid down the guywire it it sheared it and then that's what collapsed the rest of the tower as the entire structure Came Crashing Down workers on the ground scrambled for safety bill was just 100 m away my secretary who was very religious says to me run I said if the good Lord wants us he's going to take us cuz we can't outrun 2,000 ft of tower three workers were injured in the disaster but tragically the five men on the tower all lost their lives it took you know 30 to 40 seconds for the the entire Tower to fall which seemed like a lifetime what had caused this super siiz structure to come Crashing Down to Earth it seems there was a problem with the lifting plan which had worked for the main tower sections but with the antenna there were complications the final piece of antenna had those all important microwave baskets already attached to the Sid as the antenna was hoisted upright there was a risk the lifting cables would damage the sensitive microwave baskets Lee Lowry was on the team that investigated the collapse the people said okay we got problems here this great big basket that shoots out all the the signals and the wire to raise the whole piece with it is going to hit them the baskets were too sensitive to remove instead the team custom built an attachment to keep the antenna safely at an angle the uh antenna were bolted with what they call uols because they look like the letter U the cable goes up in the air and first thing you know the whole thing starts raising up like this the extension of this piece of Steel far enough down the road so that where you attach the lifting cable will when it goes up in the air towards the top of the tower the cable itself doesn't touch the microwave baskets and it never did hoisting the antenna at an angle prevented the cables from tangling with the microwave baskets but after examining the wreckage Lee found evidence that the fix had overloaded the UB bolts it's the way I found it that's where it was this is a ubolt used to be a ubolt until it got straightened out by being pulled out of the hole Lee and the team calculated that the load on the ubts had been underestimated by a factor of seven the force that broke the bolt in the first place just pulled the boolt back out of the opposing hole and straighten the ubolt out pretty much straight that is is the failure that's the only failure it's that last piece that got [Music] him as the antenna was lifted closer and closer to the top the UB bolts were struggling to cope with the strain and failed there was nothing anyone could do following the catastrophic collapse the tower was rebuilt piece by piece Bill Cordell served as project manager on the new construction the secondary the uh lifting process was changed quite a bit and it was extremely well thought out and blessed by Professional Engineers before anything was done and of course none of the rigging or UB bolts that they had used before was even considered a year after the disaster the new 600 meter tall tower was finally complete while the team still pays trip to the young men who sadly lost their lives the gentleman that filmed it that day Andy and I talk each year and we remember and have a great deal of remiss for the the young men that lost their lives here with massive infrastructure even the smallest component is crucial one tiny fail can cause a huge catastro rhy like this story in Massachusetts that wipes out a vital water Network this catastrophe triggered a state of emergency for 2 million people people were unable to cook to drink to bathe an underground mystery that had Engineers guessing everyone scratched their heads that's a new pipe how could that that [Music] happen Boston Massachusetts is one of the oldest cities in New England and owes its long existence to the Charles River Bob Zimmerman is former director of the Charles River Watershed Association water is the single most important substance on Earth for life all of us are dependent on it without it in 2 to three days most of us die like many big cities Boston relies on large scale clean water storage reservoirs located outside of the city limits Fred Ty is a local journalist the metropolitan area of Boston requires a lot of water to keep it going and in the 1930s uh major reservoir was built called called the Quin Reservoir and then another big reservoir wett reservoir these two reservoirs combined hold enough water to supply Boston with fresh waterer for 5 years but to reach the city there's a more than 50 km Journey from Reservoir to tap a lot of us take clean running water for granted but keeping it flowing takes a huge amount of engineering we just don't see it because it's mostly hidden underground in 1996 to stay on top of demand the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority started work on a brand new pipeline the Metro West Water Supply tunnel is the main tunnel that brings the water from the Quin and the wet reservoirs to the Boston metropolitan area these pipes are a massive 10 ft in diameter 250 million gallons of clean water a day can flow through them to 31 towns and cities including Boston these big tunnels Supply water to millions of people and should one of them be cut off all of a sudden you have a big part of the Boston metropolitan area that finds itself without water hidden from view the underground Aqueduct was a great success but in 2010 disaster struck 10:00 a.m. May the 1st Fred lasy executive director of the state's Water Resource Authority received a call my Chief Operating Officer uh is is unflappable and when he called there was a sense of urgency and then when he explained to me where it was I said oh no oh no the Metro West Tunnel had burst open in Weston more than 20 km from downtown Boston when I got here it was gushing it it was it looked like the telephone pole nearby was going to go the whole thing was just eroding turning up all the dirt all the dirt all the dirt Boston's clean water supply was surging up from underground there were 8 million gallons an hour flowing from this site into the river the power of water is immense and you think about 120 in barrel of pipe with water coming towards the city under great pressure and you can see why it was a huge disaster at the time everybody starts to immediate think well it can't be that big a deal right it's just a pipe but it is a big deal 8 million gallons an hour is get your attention amount of water a real issue Not only was clean water pouring out dirty Earth was being sucked into the pipes potentially contaminating everything heading for Boston this was an even bigger problem when we found out that people were unable to to cook to drink to bathe about 2 million residents who had to begin to boil their water for drinking water and get as much uh bottled water as possible the following day the leak was stopped but bostonians were still without clean water it's front page in the Boston Globe it's on the news every single night every family east of here who has to boil water or go out and buy bottled water knows about it and is concerned about it this was national news President Obama even signed an emergency disaster declaration more than a billion liters of water had escaped the race was on to get to the root of the problem everyone scratched their heads what happened how could that be that's a new pipe how could that happen a 10-year-old Aqueduct is brand new and for it to blow out something seriously bad happened as the debris was cleared it revealed a small but crucial piece of evidence the amazing thing is after all the Earth had been moved it was a pond of water we when we pumped that out and the top of the pipe started to surface we realized that that all that water was coming out in a gap between the pipes all the way around about an inch and it was just an incredible lesson in the power of water the source of the leak was clear the joint between two sections of pipe but the question was why had the connection failed Dr zarit panage chaired the investigation as a panel looked actually at the possible scenarios that caused this failure the one would be the vertical Shear so the pipes moved in the vertical Direction when we looked at the site we realized that the pipes are still aligned so that means that the vertical Shear was not a possible scenario so so then we focused actually on the coupling and looked what happened with the coupling the two pipes were clamped in place with a two-part steel coupling collar held together with eight steel studs more than 2 cm wide secured by 16 nuts as investigators dug deeper it was clear the collar was buckled completely out of shape this huge one t piece of Steel clamped two sections of pipe together with a vice like grip but it had failed catastrophically the question was why further inspection revealed that seven of the eight studs holding the collar together had broken so basically of out of eight studs that were supposed to be there only three were found and only one was still connected to the cou examining the studs revealed a flaw what we found out is that there were cracks in in these uh studs both in the valleys and on the hills on the tops of this Dr panic's team concluded that the cracking had happened during manufacturing once installed underground the studs were vulnerable to corrosion when they were installed they worked for a while until the environment caught up with them that caused corrosion along this RS in the studs and once those expanded the studs starting to fail and break ultimately the faulty studs were simply too weak to do their job huge amounts of water were being pumped through these pipes at high pressure without a rock solid connection the coupling was doomed to fail millions of residents were without Main's water so Engineers worked around the clock to repair and flush clean the Metro West Pipeline we had one group of people working on addressing the leak and fixing it we had another whole group of smart people who were dealing with the Hydraulics and the water quality issues and how do we get it turned back on to make sure it was safe cuz that would have been a real disaster if there was contaminated water on May the 4th just 3 days after the joint failed the repaired pipeline was back in Action when clean water was finally restored it was a huge relief for residents and a reminder of how to dependent we all are on the infrastructure hidden beneath our streets to avoid a repeat disaster a parallel pipeline known as the Holtman Aqueduct was upgraded ensuring there was always a route for clean water to reach Boston we are now in a vault chamber that connects the Holtman Aqueduct to the metro west tunnel and this was constructed after the water main break to create the redundancy that that we need to safely operate the system in a major event this time clamped solidly together by hundreds of studs and you can see the massive size and the strength in these [Music] couplings the events of May 2010 serve as a reminder of the massive task Engineers face keeping our Vital infrastructure operational it was a big wakeup call because we all face issues associated with infrastructure much of which is getting pretty old at this point and as it fails people are impacted nature is impacted two lessons to learn from this right one is we take water for granted we just never think about it we turn on the tap and there it is and we use as much of it as we want the other is how critical you know just one little point of failure can be when engineering goes wrong the cause can be plain for all to see but sometimes it's hidden out of [Music] sight like this story in Sweden and a Springsteen concert that really rocked the house the whole Arena started to fall apart music fans almost brought this structure to its knees you can see there with bounc like a meat or something it was very close to a big catastrophe but what could nearly take down an entire [Music] [Applause] [Music] Stadium gothamberg Sweden's second largest city is home to just over half a million people but for a small City it has a big music scene say Swedish band and chances are most of us think of ABBA who burst out of Stockholm in the 70s although less well known gothamberg has long been home to a much cooler edgier music scene Johan Lindquist is a local music reporter it's been a music town for many many years the music here is comes from the underground uh we have a lot of metal uh hip-hop reggy music we have great venues and a lot of vibrant music [Music] life this is gothenburg's near ulvi Stadium named after the Norse god of games and Sport with a capacity of 75,000 the more than 200 M long oval is the largest outdoor arena in Scandinavia and has hosted some of the biggest names in music L Nebel is CEO of the company that runs the ulivi so uh this is where the magic happens and through those doors you've had rock stars like Madonna you had pink Coldplay you had loads of famous people walking in and making magic for thousands and thousands of people before the music scene took gothamberg by storm the stadium was designed for the soccer World Cup when Olivia was built it cost $4 million us the venue was ready to welcome uh the world championships in soccer in 1958 the field is towered over by two 52 M tall pylons holding flood lights and helping to support the roof below the design was unique but the structure like many stadiums was concrete and steel Professor yuran Shel forch is a geotechnical engineer oliv stadium was designed and built in the 1950s the main part of iivy is made of CAS in place concrete and the roof is made of steel beams and lightweight concrete sitting on top of the beams this part of golenberg sits on Clay it's a great flat surface for a soccer pitch but the concrete structure of the stadium would need much stronger support the solution was a network of piles beneath the seating areas here we see a cross-section of olivy with a main structure cast in place concrete we have the clay layer we have the merine and we have the Bedrock and here are the concrete piles that go all the way down to bedrock which carries all the loads from the arena in the 1980s ulv V began hosting concerts and one of its first acts was Bruce Springstein in ' 85 Bruce Springstein was playing two nights at oliv and was his biggest tour up to date I mean he was bigger and more popular than ever and selling out big Arenas all over the world I mean there was a kind of Hysteria going on of course Stefan hamstra was working in the arena at the time I was only 18 19 year we working here so everybody has both U album Born in the USA so they knew the songs and uh they were ready for the concert like 64 65,000 people at that point that was the biggest crowd at T for any concert and I guess there were mostly teenagers there it was a lot of energy and a lot of jumping up and down during the concert the energy was building up so was uh crazy we who um worked in a kosk couldn't stand still you uh automatically danced in the kiosk towards the end Bruce played the old classic Twist and Shout and people uh even got more crazy than before and uh the whole Arena moved like this 10 cm or something and then you looked up the roof you can see the roof bouncing like a meter or something and you saw it from here so uh yeah I was uh rocking at the arena thousands of people jumping to twist and Sh the whole Arena started to fall apart for me it was exciting but uh maybe if you think about it after maybe it was a little bit scary the shaking wasn't limited to the stadium apartment owners 400 m away reported ornaments and books falling from their shelves as the music faded it became clear that this hadn't been a small Shakedown after the concert they had to look to look at the arena and they discovered that there were uh damages done to the structure the stadium had previously survived the Rolling Stones So what had the boss done to cause such trouble the source of the problem wasn't in the stadium structure itself but in the ancient ground beneath the soccer field here in the inner field is a lot of clay and this when the audience started to jump here that mean meant that the clay started to move like this back in the 50s the pitch or infield was built to have two football teams and the referee running around on it not 20,000 plus excited fans jumping up and down all that jumping wasn't just pound ing the floor it was also rocking the stadium and its Towers so the force from the audience goes into the clay the clay expands like a pulse and that affects the piles so they Bend out a little not very much couple of centim perhaps but that will give deformation that then will be transmitted up to the structure and enlarge so it's a rhythmic pulse coming up also into the structure we've all felt the pulses of heavy base from loud music imagine that happening to the clay beneath the pitch over and over pushing on the pile supporting the stadium and its Towers the pulses weren't the only problem the frequency of the jumping matched the Clay's natural resonance experts calculated the Resonance of the clay was between 1 .5 and 3 Hertz or cycles per second the music and the jumping of the crowd was 2.4 Hertz right in the sweet spot for causing Mayhem that is close to the resonance frequency of the clay and then there is no damping and that's why it's enlarged and it's going to increase all the time as the pulse keeps going on although fans didn't realize it at the time the stands were dangerously close to collapse now here we see the concrete structure and between those constructions there are beams concrete beams and they are supported like this and this is probably about 20 cm or so and during the concert these started to move up and down and also sideways and in the inspection after after the concert they found out that the support was very limited and it was very close to a big catastrophe these days everyone jokes about the crowd nearly bringing the stadium down but the truth is here they came frighteningly close to actually doing it ulvi Stadium closed its doors while Engineers resolved its structural Integrity although the building itself was fine the field needed support to prevent it from bouncing well the stadia had to be reinforced using over 100 pillars each having a diameter of 1 and A2 M and a length between 20 and 60 M uh because you need to reach Solid Ground and as a result you can see it in the garage you can actually see the pillars and the the size of them the network of piles was driven down into the Bedrock Thomas tailand is UL 's construction project manager now we are under the pitch here you see it from below the roof in the garage and over here you can see every 15 M you can see the piles every one of these piles they had to stand on the Rock so it's a big job a lot of concrete once the PS were driven into the Bedrock they were like a network of giant still supporting the pitch above now however hard fans jump the clay below and the Stadium won't be going anywhere three decades after that dramatic night Springstein returned to the uvy are you ready to test this stadium and proved the fix really had worked this time the only thing rocking was the music boss has left the building he does not want to break another station

Channel: Banijay Science

Views: 57,893

Keywords: Boston water failure, Hudson River bridge, Sweden stadium collapse, Texas tower disaster, buildings, construction fails, documentary, engineering, engineering challenges, engineering disasters, engineering documentary, engineering errors, engineering fails, engineering lessons learned, engineering mistakes, failed constructions, fails, massive engineering failures, mechanical engineering, saving buildings

Id: AQ67jy-jISw

Length: 45min 1sec (2701 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 01 2024