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In Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, a team of engineers have just one year to build the world's first rock 'n' roll theme park, Hard Rock Park.
In Odense, Denmark, three thousand shipyard workers build the world's biggest container ship in the biggest little shipyard around. They have just 45 days in dry dock to complete this mammoth vessel.
The engineers had no choice. They had to build a new floating bridge in Kelowna, British Columbia. Lake Okanagan was too deep and too muddy to sink columns to support a standard bridge so the engineers designed a bridge of nine pontoons, each as long as a Canadian football field. Then they decided to make the floating pontoons out of concrete! But, with only a dozen or so floating bridges around the world, no one on the construction team has any experience building a floating bridge.
Engineers and work crews must learn from scratch how to build the massive pontoons. Then marine crews must tow the concrete behemoths across the lake and line up each pontoon to the next to tolerances of millimeters. It's a tense day when the pontoon that marine project manager Kevin Giberson and his second in command Kevin Hamakawa are towing is pushed dangerously close to submerged cables by Lake Okanagan's currents. But after two and a half years of hard work through blistering Canadian summers and frigid winters, Kelowna and the world get a new floating bridge
In Las Vegas -- the quintessential city of razzle-dazzle and bling -- MGM is going for the ultimate one-upmanship. The Hollywood lion is building a 31-hectare mini-city with all amenities for those living there or visiting. It'll cost a cool $9 billion -- the largest privately financed project in North America - ever. This is a story of a massive project being built in a very short time.
In South Korea engineers are fighting against the forces of the wild West Sea to build a mammoth bridge that will link the biggest airport to a new international investment zone.
The Aker H6e is the biggest oil rig on the planet, built for the extreme conditions of the Barents Sea, located north of Norway.
Marine operations chief Knut Engebretsen and his team of Norwegian engineers have tight deadlines for some major moves to put this monster together. The oil rig is so big that half of it is being constructed in Norway and the other half is being built in Dubai where construction costs are cheaper. When the Dubai-built structure is finished, it will make the 53 day journey via the Suez Canal to Norway for final assembly.
The construction crew have to 'skid' eight-thousand-tonne hull pieces on rails across a giant yard. The steel deck that goes on top of the hull weighs more than 11,000 tonnes. Raising it up in the air ten storeys will be one of the most extreme heavy lifts ever attempted by the construction crew. On top of these mega-challenges, this hardy crew of Norwegian engineers has to battle extreme bad weather along the way.
It's the ultimate engineering challenge: rescue the magnificent city of Venice, Italy, before it is drowned by the Adriatic Sea. A fantastic 5.5 billion dollar plan is taking shape. It's called the "Mose project", after the biblical saviour Moses. They're constructing 78 massive floodgates, up to 29 metres tall, that will lie on the seabed. Whenever a dangerous high tide threatens the city the gates are supposed to rise from water and hold back the sea. The dynamic woman at the helm; Chief Engineer, Dr. Maria Theresa Brotto, declares, "Without the Mose, we will lose Venice." But no one can predict when a colossal high tide will swamp the city and it's a race against time for the workers of the Mose project.
