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Private Notes
Building the Sheikh Zayed Bridge, the stunning grand gateway to the world's richest city, Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, is a king size headache for Mark Jones, the engineer assembling its giant signature arches. "It's an architect's dream, an engineer's nightmare," he says .The bridge is millions over budget and years behind schedule. It's as much sculpture as structure, and when art meets engineering, worlds collide. No one has ever built a bridge like this. Mega Builders cameras follow Jones and his crew as they solve one frustrating challenge after another, lifting and joining together 600 tonne steel segments bigger than houses with the largest crane in the Middle East to complete the South Marina Arch at the world's most difficult bridge.
South Africa has a lot riding on being the host of the next FIFA World Cup. It's important and prestigious. Cape Town is building a brand-new stadium for the occasion - with a challenging high-tech roof. The project is way behind schedule because there's a lack of skilled labour, and too few cranes to do the work. The notorious winds of Cape Town, late shipments, crane breakdowns - all of them keep this construction team on their toes.
Deep in Canada's rugged western coastal mountains a new hydroelectric project is underway. It's a 600 million dollar venture diverting massive glacial rivers into a huge pipeline built against down steep mountain slopes. In the valley below turbines will be installed to generate electricity sent out to the coast by a new transmission line carved through heavy bush. A tight group of rugged bushwackers and fearless engineers are building all of it in spectacular but remote bush where grizzlies roam and eagles soar. There's no road access so the crews fly in by seaplane to work for weeks at a time. It's a dangerous job where crews work in all kinds of weather from heavy snow with a threat of avalanches to extreme heat with a threat of forest fires. Accidents including a deadly plane crash shake the workers but don't stop them.
In Ho Chi Minh City (formerly known as Saigon), engineers are on a mission to modernize. Construction is underway to raise Phu My Bridge, a brand-new $100 million cable-stayed bridge. The bridge is a cornerstone in a visionary plan of growth. Vietnam is nation rising out of a long economic slump, but as the country begins to flourish, progress is bringing gridlock to the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. The Phu My Bridge will be a critical link in a new highway system that the city's planners hope will relieve traffic congestion in the urban core. The job to solve the problem falls on the shoulders of a crack engineering team. Construction Manager Kurt Feller faces the brunt of pressure to build the bridge. He must lead the team, and deliver the bridge on its due date - Independence Day in Vietnam. It's a job the former Swiss military Sergeant takes on like a man going into battle. Australian Tim Pittaway, the Bridge Manager, keeps operations on the cable-stayed bridge deck in line and on schedule. French engineer Alain Granet is a contractor who must pull off the most dangerous lifts on the site. Vietnamese-Canadian T.T. Tran and young Vietnamese engineer Nguyen Thanh Nam round out the team in a suspense-filled drama above the Saigon River. The pressure is on the engineering team as deadlines move up and the delivery date looms.
A group of engineers in England and Wales has taken on the biggest challenge of the next Summer Olympic Games -- the construction of a complex steel-truss roof for the new Aquatics Centre. Shaped like a giant ocean wave, it's truly a high-tech wonder. Three thousand tonnes of steel will rest on only three points, like a tripod, leaving a 115-metre span of the roof totally unsupported. The fabricators and construction crews have their orders. Get this one absolutely right, because there's no room for even a millimetre of error. Only gold-medal perfection will do.
Weary commuters in Istanbul, Turkey must tough it out after the Marmaray Project is delayed four years by the discovery of the city's fourth century port with thirty-four ancient shipwrecks. It's one of the most significant maritime archaeological discoveries ever made. But, inconveniently, the port is discovered at Yenikapi, site of the biggest subway station in this $3.5 billion, seventy-seven kilometre long rapid transit project aimed at easing Istanbul's traffic woes.
In Johannesburg, South Africa, engineers are less than 2 years away from delivering South Africa's first new commuter rail line in four decades. It's called the Gautrain, and it will be one of the most state-of-the-art rail systems on the continent. The Gautrain will link three vital points with 80 kilometres of track: Johannesburg's central business district, O.R. Tambo International Airport, and central Pretoria. Planners hope it will carry up to 100 000 passengers per day, and pull thousands of cars off the area's jammed highways. A building team of elite engineers led by Ian Thoms, Nicolas Descamps, and Jeff Groves has landed in South Africa to take on the Gautrain challenge. They face an uphill battle with an invisible and unpredictable enemy - the sinkhole prone terrain near Pretoria. But despite this and other tests of their will, they stay on course. As the rail line grows, it comes to represent the unfaltering spirit of its builders, and of this rising African nation.
