Today, on "Impossible Engineering",
the Panama canal expansion,
one of the largest infrastructure projects
in the world.
This is one of the biggest projects ever made.
It is a big challenge, but that's what we pilots like.
We like challenge.
This expansion takes engineering to new heights.
The gates are enormous.
The gates are like an 11-story building.
Relying on pioneering innovations of the past...
It feels more like a cathedral than a functional structure.
...It took revolutionary engineering
to make the impossible possible.
... Captions by vitac... www.Vitac.Com
Captions paid for by Discovery communications
Panama.
For more than 100 years, the Panama canal
has provided a vital shipping link
between the pacific and Atlantic oceans.
But by 2006,
engineer Luis Ferreira and his colleagues
find themselves in a massive predicament.
The problem with the original Panama canal
is that the ships are growing,
and the ship cannot fit through the existing canal.
Since the original Panama canal
was completed in 1914,
ships have increased around three times in size.
Many are so immense,
they simply cannot squeeze through the original canal,
forcing these big ships on a costly two-week detour
around south America,
wasting a million extra gallons of fuel.
We need a bigger canal.
The solution?
An engineering project of epic proportions...
the Panama canal expansion project,
one of the biggest infrastructure projects
in the world.
This massive construction
includes six new lock flights,
each one spanning the length of four soccer fields.
The gates separating each chamber
reach the heights of an 11-story building.
To make way for them,
a staggering 5.3 billion cubic feet of earth
must be dredged.
A whopping 155 million cubic feet of concrete
encase over 215,000 tons
of structural steel.
The result is a 48-mile-long canal
that can finally accommodate
some of the largest ships in the world.
But building it is no easy feat.
We have big challenge here.
You have to understand, the canal
has to go over mountains in order to do this.
For chief engineer Ilya De Marotta,
expanding this iconic canal is a tall order.
The Panama canal is a canal
that moves ships from one ocean to the other one,
pacific-Atlantic or Atlantic to pacific,
through a mountain range,
so you have to put a ship through the mountains.
So what do we do?
Overcoming this massive obstacle
would be impossible
without the great innovators from the past.
Engineer Dr. Rhys Morgan is exploring
the Loire valley in France
to examine an innovation
that changed water transportation forever.
At the start of the 17th century,
king Henry iv of France had to rebuild a country
that was ravaged by decades of religious wars.
Facing widespread food shortages,
the king wanted to connect the north with the south
and build a canal to link the Loire and the seine.
But between the two rivers,
a Ridge rises up 130 feet,
making the link seemingly impossible.
To make boats sail uphill,
31-year-old hydraulics engineer Hugues Cosnier
developed an ingenious solution.
Here in the village of Rogny-Les-Sept-écluses
is the most extraordinary example
of what Cosnier achieved.
It's a staircase lock,
the first of its kind in Europe.
Seven interconnected chambers enable the boats
to rise up the steep terrain.
It's a wonderful and beautiful example
of engineering.
To traverse the slope, Cosnier's staircase
used a sequence of lock chambers
to lift boats 10 feet at a time.
Well, prior to this, there was a method
of doing this called a flash lock
which involved a single step
from the lower level to the higher level,
but it was very dangerous.
As soon as the gate was removed,
there would be a torrent of water,
and the boat had to be pulled up through it
and then the gate closed behind it quickly.
You can see the obvious dangers in this,
and the boat could get damaged. The goods would be damaged.
It was just a terrible way
to lift the boat over the terrain.
Cosnier's ingenious idea was to introduce a second gate...
...so that there would be a series of isolated chambers
in which the water levels could be equalized
and adjusted as appropriate.
The boat would come in from the lower level,
and the gate would be closed behind it,
sealing it into the chamber.
The next stage was to slowly bring in the water...
...until they will naturally equalize.
Now the door could be easily opened
without any water flushing through,
and the boat could safely travel through.
By using a total of 36 lock chambers,
Cosnier surmounted the 130-foot-high watershed
and made the entire canal system possible.
It must have been such a sight,
a truly pioneering feat of engineering.
To build the Panama canal over the mountains,
engineers super-size Hugues Cosnier's lock staircase
on an epic scale.
Workers construct a total of six giant chambers,
three on each side of the canal,
requiring a stunning 120 million cubic feet of concrete.
Building the new locks had a lot of great
technological challenges.
Needless to say, the structures are massive,
unique designs.
We have three chambers.
Each raises the vessel 9 meters.
So the vessel goes 27 meters high
through an artificial lake,
and it goes down the same three steps down the other side.
But getting ships through the mountains
is only half the battle.
The new locks require more than 20,000 workers
excavating well over 2 billion cubic feet
of rock and earth.
That's 2.6 million dump-truck loads.
There's a lot of excavation that had to be done.
It's a lot of earth moving.
And not only was the earth moving,
but the geology of the area,
because you're going from sea level up to the mountains.
However, contracts manager Jorge De la Guardia
must modify the landscape not only above the water,
but also below the water.
We are looking, here, at the approach channel.
Deepening and widening the channels for navigation
presented quite a big engineering challenge,
'cause you have very hard rock,
and there are areas where you just have,
like, a muddy surface.
So that was the big challenge that we had.
To dig this deep, engineers must rely on...
The D'Artagnan,
one of the world's biggest cutter suction dredgers.
And at the pacific side of the canal,
this machine faces one tough problem...
rock-solid bedrock.
We had to prepare the navigational channels for ships
that are bigger and are deeper.
To cut out this roadblock, D'Artagnan uses
a computer-controlled rotating cutter tool
like those employed on tunnel-boring machines.
This enormous cutter smashes
the bedrock to smithereens.
Then the D'Artagnan sucks up the detritus
with a giant pump.
But the dredging and excavation
produce huge amounts of waste material,
creating a seemingly impossible problem.
We needed a place to deposit
the material that we were excavating,
but to find areas where we could,
you know, deposit 50, 60 million cubic meters of material
is not an easy thing.
Compounding this problem is an altogether unusual one.
The adjacent wastelands are deadly.
This was a contaminated area.
This was not a place where you could walk or use it,
because it was with unexploded ordinance.
This former U.S. army firing range
is littered with live ammunition.
To dispose of the 2.1 billion cubic feet of earth
on these treacherous lands,
the engineers must draw on one of history's great innovations.
The Panama canal expansion project...
spanning 48 miles, it's one of the biggest
infrastructure projects in the world.
But disposing of the immense quantities of bedrock
in the nearby wastelands is a deadly prospect.
This was a contaminated area.
This was not a place where you could walk or use it,
because it was with unexploded ordinance.
To discard 2.1 billion cubic feet of earth
in an area filled with live ammunition,
engineers must turn to the past.
Physicist Andrew Steele is at the south coast of England.
In the 1940s, these beaches
were heavily fortified
against invasion from the Nazis.
When you've got a landscape
that's littered with unexploded rounds,
there's always the risk that someone's gonna set
one of them off, and people are going to get killed.
And armies have taken this
and used it on purpose to create a weapon
that can provide an unmanned line of defense...
the land mine.
Representing a land mine,
this weight demonstrates the problem they present
when buried.
It's literally child's play to dig a hole...
...Shove a mine underneath it,
and then cover it all in sand.
And now, it's pretty hard
to tell there's anything there at all.
During world war II,
the Germans also used land mines
against the Allies,
notably in the deserts of the African front.
To help the Allies, Jozef Kosacki,
a Polish army engineer who'd escaped to Britain,
devised a clever solution.
This is what he developed.
This is actually a slightly more modern version
of Kosacki's device, and it uses the principles
of electromagnetism and resonance
to detect hidden metal objects.
Everything has a frequency in which it likes to vibrate,
like a bell.
Just like hitting a solid object,
the electrical current in a coil of wire
will fluctuate at a particular frequency.
It can also induce a current in a coil close to it.
If the coils have the same natural frequency,
the current in the second coil
will get amplified or resonate,
getting louder and louder.
What Jozef Kosacki developed was a portable way
of using these principles to detect metal.
So, what we've got here are our two coils
which we're going to be using, obviously, to detect the metal.
We've also got an amplifier
and, so we can hear what's going on,
we got a speaker, as well.
So let's plug this thing together and see how it works.
So, red into red, and blue into blue.
And what that means is we've set up the conditions
for a feedback circuit.
We've got the input of the amplifier
being powered by one of the coils,
which then goes out again amplified
and powers the second coil.
And that means that if there's enough connection
between those two coils,
we've got the potential for the same signal to go 'round
and 'round and 'round in a loop and get louder and louder,
just like what happens if you take a microphone too close
to a set of speakers.
So now we're going to go out and have a look for that mine.
That low background hum you can hear is 'cause those coils,
they're just close enough together
that they're almost on the point of feeding back.
And all it takes is the presence of a little bit of metal
just to increase the coupling between those two coils,
and then we'll see
if we can find that mine I laid.
Oh, there we go.
And then, there we go, dead easy.
We found that fake mine that we planted earlier.
Jozef Kosacki invented the first
practical, portable metal detector.
In 1942, Kosacki's mine detector was put into production,
and in the Autumn of that year,
500 of them were secretly shipped
to allied forces near Cairo.
Fire!
At the legendary battle of El Alamein,
British engineers used these detectors
to clear a path through the German minefields,
ultimately leading the Allies to a decisive victory.
And this, the device he invented,
was so successful that versions of his detector,
first used in world war II,
have been used for clearing minefields
and detecting unexploded bombs and shells ever since.
The Panama canal expansion project utilizes
the modern-day equivalents of Kosacki's detector
to clear the unexploded weaponry.
We got companies that were experts at doing this.
They would isolate an area, and then they were going
very, very carefully locating.
And every time they located something, they marked it,
and then other people came over to retrieve that.
Then they piled them over together
and blew them up, if they were live.
In all, the teams remove more than 3,000 pieces
of live ammunition and destroy them.
That was one of the biggest challenges
because, thank god, nobody got hurt,
and we didn't have any accidents on it.
And we cleaned 460 hectares of unexploded ordinance.
But clearing the surroundings of explosives
is just the start.
The ship that can enter the existing canal
can move between 4,000 to 4,500 containers.
This ship is bringing between 12,000
to 13,000 containers.
To build facilities capable
of accommodating ships this massive,
engineers must overcome a series of epic challenges...
You can easily have an accident, run aground.
...And draw on innovators from history...
It's amazing. It really is massive.
...To make the impossible possible.
The Panama canal expansion project...
building on the innovations of the original 1914 canal,
a staggering 5.3 billion cubic feet of earth
must be dredged on both sides of the canal,
paving the way for today's super-sized ships.
Engineers complete the epic construction
in June 2016,
and this colossal container ship
is about to put it to the test.
For the first time ever,
this ship will attempt to pass through the new locks.
Half to port, bow thruster.
The big challenge was to build a canal
so we could fit this type of ship.
This ship are going into a locks
that has 427 meters in length
by 55 meters in width.
With just inches to spare on either side of the hull,
chief canal pilot Mario Chong has little room for error.
Stop the thruster. Hard to starboard.
Hard to starboard!
It is a big challenge,
and so you do have to be extremely careful.
Any erratic movement,
you can easily have an accident, run aground,
because they're bigger.
Mario must edge his 1,063-foot-long ship
through a flight of three enormous locks
to reach the elevated section of the canal.
Half to port, bow thruster.
Half to port. Beautiful, sir.
Well, right now, we are in a process
of moving the ships through the locks,
through the chamber, keeping the vessel
in proper position inside the locks.
To reach the elevated section of the canal,
engineers must guide these enormous ships
through two gigantic staircase locks
at either end of the canal
that will lift the ship nearly 90 feet.
But as chief locks design engineer Cheryl George
discovers, simply super-sizing existing designs isn't enough.
Although we have locks around the world that are wider,
we do not have any that are wider, longer,
and deeper and, in addition,
that have the three steps.
The biggest challenge that we encountered
in the decision on the new locks
was the type of gates that we would use.
To create lock gates powerful enough
to withstand the tremendous pressure of water,
engineers must look to the past.
Most canal locks use miter gates
to create the chamber for raising
- and lowering boats. - Up we go.
The gates have the advantage that the upstream water pressure
squeezes the gates together,
minimizing any leaks
as long as the gates face the right direction.
But once the locks get wider, so do the gates,
and eventually, they're so big
that they take up a huge amount of room.
And they get so heavy, they are difficult to support,
which is why engineers had to develop
other ways to seal such enormous locks.
Restoration historian Tuija Lind
is in Finland to witness the use
of an innovative watertight gate
that changed engineering history.
We're currently off the coast of Helsinki,
approaching one of the largest sea fortresses in the world.
The sprawling citadel of Suomenlinna is home
to one of Europe's oldest operating dry docks.
Today, the dock workers are getting boats in and out
before winter sets in.
But keeping the water out of the dry dock
hinges on the effectiveness of the gates.
Traditional dock gates swing open like large double doors
but were difficult to maintain
and put strain on the infrastructure of the dock.
Worse still, some docks used temporary gates
made out of wood and mud that had to be destroyed
every time the lock needed re-flooding.
To resolve this problem,
British naval architect Samuel Bentham
came up with a revolutionary idea in 1796,
an example of which still stands here today.
It's amazing.
It really is massive.
Called a ship caisson,
this groundbreaking lock would revolutionize
canal locks across the planet.
The Panama canal expansion project
links the pacific and Atlantic oceans,
making way for modern-day massive cargo ships,
but holding the water back
and allowing the ships to pass safely
relies on a watertight innovation
from the 18th century.
Called a ship caisson,
Samuel Bentham's lock is an ingenious cross
between a gate and a boat.
Today, we can see this 200-year-old invention
in action.
Right now, the caisson gate is full of water.
But first, workers must open the valves
from the canal to flood the dry dock.
I'm really excited.
Now the water in the lock has reached the level
where we can start pumping the water out of the gate,
and then the gate starts floating.
Soon the gate becomes buoyant.
Now the gate is floating,
and I think we will soon relieve it
and put it on the outer dock.
Despite weighing 90 tons,
the floating gate moves by human power alone.
Bentham's invention is in action,
and it's amazing.
It has really stood the test of time.
With the ship caisson now safely out of the way,
boats can enter and leave the dock as necessary.
It's really great.
The genius of Bentham's design becomes clear
when the floating caisson goes back into the entrance.
Once flooded, it settles into a slot in the stonework
at the bottom of the dock-mouth,
forming a watertight seal.
Water can then be pumped out of the basin
to create the dry dock once again.
Bentham's idea of a floating gate
changed the way dry docks were sealed forever.
This brilliant concept of a floating gate
can be seen in canals
and dockyards around the world to this day.
Today, the Panama canal employs 16 new locks,
but with a massive SPiN on the floatable caisson gate.
The gates are enormous.
The gates are like an 11-story building.
The gates all differ slightly in design
depending on which set of locks they are used in.
The ones at the lake are about 2,500 tons
with all of the machinery,
and the sea gates on the pacific
are about 4,400 tons.
Taking Bentham's original ship caisson
one giant step further,
these gates roll in and out of position.
This can only be achieved because they float.
The gates are supported on an upper and a lower wagon,
but the wagons do not take 100% of the weight.
The gates actually float,
and only about 15% of the weight
is actually carried by the wagons.
But for the $5 billion expansion
to be worth the cost,
operators must keep traffic moving smoothly.
At 12:00, I have a dock at 12:00.
We only have one Lane.
We cannot shut it down for anything.
We have to be open 24/7.
However, shipping accidents do happen.
So how do you protect
a 224,000-ton fully laden cargo ship
like this one from disaster?
Stop the back thruster, amidships.
- Amidships! - Amidships!
This would be impossible
without the innovators of the past.
The Panama canal expansion project...
at a whopping $5 billion,
this enormous renovation of the original canal
must make way for newer, bigger ships.
But to prevent disasters like these,
engineers must look to the past.
Materials scientist Scott Ramsay is in New York City.
Here, in the 19th century,
concerns over the ivory trade
led to the development of a world-changing material
which came from an unlikely place...
billiards.
Some of the key players in the ivory trade
were the billiard ball manufacturers.
Tragically, one elephant tusk,
such as this enormous, yet accurately sized replica,
could only be used to make four at most
and, more often than not, a measly two balls.
Faced with the loss of such a crucial resource
and the possibility of going out of business,
one billiard ball manufacturer, Phelan and Collender,
located right here on 10th Avenue,
offered a $10,000 reward
to find an alternative material.
In their attempts to develop new materials
for billiard balls,
engineers developed many forms of plastic,
including one called parkesine.
Parkesine and other early plastics
were a combination of cellulose,
nitric acid, and sulfuric acid.
While it could be easily molded into a variety things,
they were prone to cracking,
and so their broader application was quite limited.
But upon seeing the billiard ball manufacturer's
$10,000 reward, John Wesley Hyatt,
a printer and inventor from Albany, New York,
tried using different additives
to improve the nitrocellulose material.
Hyatt discovered the importance of one key ingredient, camphor,
found in the wood of a Laurel tree.
If we take this bowl of pasta
to represent molecules of nitrocellulose,
you can see in their current state
they really stick together,
and it wouldn't make a very useful plastic.
So what we need is a short, little molecule
to get in between these and free them up
so they can slide past one another.
In modern terms, we'd call that a plasticizer,
and in Hyatt's day, that was the camphor.
So if we take this olive oil to represent the camphor,
Hyatt realized by adding just the right amount,
he could free the molecules up
and create a moldable plastic.
With camphor added to the nitrocellulose,
Hyatt invented a unique material
that could be molded, cut,
shaped, and polished with ease.
And he used it to manufacture not just billiard balls,
but false teeth and piano keys, too.
Hyatt had created a material that was strong, easy to form,
and an ideal replacement for ivory.
He called his material celluloid,
and it's considered to be the forerunner
of modern plastics.
Subsequent generations of these plastics
now make it possible for today's colossal cargo ships
to squeeze safely through the new Panama canal route.
It's important that we have protection for the vessels
coming through the locks in the chambers,
so we put fendering all over.
There's about 6,000 fenders between Atlantic and pacific
to protect the vessel
and the locks from hitting each other.
The fenders are made out of rubber
with a sliding coat on the front. We call it
the ultra-high-molecular-weight material.
Ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene
is a hard-wearing thermoplastic
which creates very little friction
when in contact with another surface.
Thrusters, slow to port.
Stop the thruster. Hard to starboard.
Hard to starboard!
The way we operate is the vessel goes
and leans against the fenders a little bit
while the water is going up or down in the chamber,
so it's very important that we have that
for protection of both the vessel and the lock.
Because of the pioneering efforts
of John Wesley Hyatt,
chief pilot Mario Chong
can squeeze his enormous cargo vessel
through the locks without causing any damage.
The low-friction thermoplastic coating on the fenders
enables the hull to slide along their surface
rather than catch,
while the rubber absorbs the impact.
Okay. Stop the thruster.
- Hard to starboard. - Hard to starboard!
So far, the fenders have been doing their job
close to the wall that I'm seeing.
Thank you, sir.
But even when the Panama canal expansion
operates smoothly,
there's one issue that engineers must address
for the canal to run it all.
To solve that, they must rely on innovations of the past...
It feels more like a cathedral than a functional structure.
...To make the impossible possible.
The Panama canal expansion
is one of the biggest infrastructure projects
ever attempted on earth.
With deeper, wider channels and enormous new locks,
modern-day giant cargo ships like this one
can now cut between the Atlantic and pacific oceans.
And the stakes for getting these vessels through
are sky high.
That ship is paying $850,000
just to come through the canal.
But operating these gigantic 11-story-high locks
could create a huge environmental headache.
One of the main resources for the canal to operate
is water, fresh water.
No water, no transit of ships.
So water is one of our main concerns.
To keep it running,
the canal relies on a man-made reservoir,
lake Gatun.
- Hard to port. - Hard to port.
- Stop the back thruster.
Gates are fully opening. Here we go.
But the increased demand for water
to operate the new locks
poses two significant threats.
We had to be very careful
on how we're going to use this water,
because, of course, this is bigger chambers, bigger vessels.
They will use more water for the transit.
The city of Panama and the city of colon
take water from Gatun lake for drinking water,
so it's of primal importance
not only for the transit of the vessels,
but also for the water consumption of the cities.
So how do you operate a canal of epic proportions
and still conserve water?
Engineers must look to the trailblazers of the past
for inspiration.
Physicist Dr. Suzie Sheehy is in Istanbul, Turkey...
...exploring an engineering marvel
that transformed a small settlement into a global power.
A source of its power lies hidden
beneath the city streets.
This is the basilica cistern,
and it's a stunning example
of Roman hydraulic engineering.
Built in the 6th century,
the basilica cistern is the largest remaining
of several hundred water-holding tanks
designed to prevent evaporation
and keep water clean.
It's amazing to think that this incredible place
was built just to hold water,
when it feels more like a cathedral
than a functional structure.
It's 140 meters long by 70 meters wide,
and there's more than 300 marble columns
holding the roof 9 meters above the floor.
The Roman emperor Constantine the great
inspired the engineering wonder
when he relocated the empire's capital
from Rome to what's now Istanbul.
But to make way for an imperial city, Roman engineers
needed a massive water-storage system.
The walls are almost 4 meters thick,
and they're covered in a waterproof lime plaster.
It can hold about 80 million liters of water,
and when it was in use,
this whole space would have been full.
Fed by a staggering 155-mile-long
network of channels and aqueducts
that brought freshwater from the nearby hills,
this entire system delivered water to the city
with nothing more than gravity.
The hydraulic engineering that went into building this city
is incredible, and without those engineers,
this city would never have been the success that it was.
And it's unbelievable to think that this beautiful structure
was still being used by the ottoman sultans
nearly 1,400 years after it was built.
Chief locks design engineer Cheryl George
and the engineering team
are bringing the idea of a gravity-fed
water-holding tank to an even more stupendous scale
and using it to recycle the water.
The concept was to come up with water-saving basins
to limit the amount of water that is used
with each lockage at the new locks.
Each new lock has three water-holding basins
attached to it, staggered at different heights.
Instead of having water flow through the locks
and then into the ocean,
the precious contents divert into these ponds.
As the lock empties,
the water channels into the highest pond,
then the middle one, then the lowest one.
Only then is the water in the lowest part of the lock
dumped into the adjacent lock.
To refill the lock,
the lowest holding basin drains first,
followed by the middle one and then the highest.
The lock's water levels at the top
with water from the canal.
To operate, the three water-holding basins
rely on an elaborate valve system
and nothing more than gravity.
We're saving 60% of water,
and that is a lot of water. And we've done it.
It's working without any problem.
The whole system now allows pilots like Mario
to guide these super-sized cargo ships
through the new Panama canal.
The most exciting thing about being a pilot
of the Panama canal is be disembarking.
I just wave at the captain and crew, you know,
and seeing the ships going to sea.
The Panama canal expansion project
is an epic undertaking
that has stretched its makers to the limit.
This is something that we should be proud as engineers,
because this is what we built.
Everything came together as it should.
The work that we promised the country
and the shipping industry that we would do,
and to see it actually working
and see the ships actually using the locks
is really a sense of great pride
for all of us.
By learning from the great pioneers of the past,
adapting, up-scaling, and making innovations of their own,
the engineers and designers
of the Panama canal expansion project
have made the impossible possible.
It's a dream job. It's a dream job for anybody.
But for an engineer, it's, like, top notch.