Extreme Engineering — Season 2

Jul 2004

The Turning Torso is the world's largest residential structure, rising 190 meters above Malmö, Sweden.

Jul 2004

Global warming is causing sea levels around the world to rise and environmental experts believe Venice may well go the same way as Atlantis. The new flood gates should prevent the city’s 45km of canals from cannibalising its ancient architecture.

Jul 2004

Covers the docking of a container ship at Long Beach (California) and the operation of the water front docks, where several thousand containers need to be unloaded and loaded in 48 hours. Also covered is the building of the Adrian Maersk, the world's largest container ship. While the scale of these gigantic ships has to be seen to be believed, the construction must be precise to millimeters.

Aug 2004

The New Bay Bridge is the biggest construction project in California history. This two-mile, earthquake-proof road will replace the most heavily trafficked bridge in the country-the span linking San Francisco to Oakland and the East Bay.

Sept 2004

Around 200 miles northeast of the capital, Reykjavik, engineers are hard at work drilling 72km of tunnels deep in the mountains. Three full-face boring machines have been specially shipped from the US to this remote site, 100 miles south of the Arctic Circle. The tunnel’s purpose is to guide water to the valley floor from reservoirs that are also currently under construction. The cascading water will drive six turbines, each with a rated output of 115 megawatts. With a total capacity of 690 megawatts, it will be the biggest hydropower plant in Europe.

Sept 2004

Engineers redesign oil platforms to withstand the harsh weather conditions in the Gulf of Mexico.

Oct 2004

Connecting the bustling port city of Charleston and Mount Pleasant in South Carolina, the Cooper River Bridge will be the longest cable-stay bridge in America. The structure stands on one of the most seismic spots on the East Coast, it also faces the frequent threat of 300kmph hurricanes.

Nov 2004

In a remote corner of France, traffic between the south of France and Paris and the north have run into huge bottlenecks. Designers and engineers are working to open the region by building a bridge to leap across the 1.3-mile wide gorge.

Nov 2004

In northern Minnesota, the operators of the world's largest open-pit iron mine commission the construction of a $10 million custom-built super-shovel in the hopes of making excavation more efficient.