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Private Notes
Riley's headed to the Wild West - just outside Yellowstone Park near Cody, Wyo., to rebuild one of the first ski lifts in the country. Riley joins cowboys of the ski lift industry to rehab 10 towers from piles of used parts. Building just outside of picturesque Yellowstone in the rugged back country presents additional challenges. To get several of the towers up the mountain, the guys bring in a special helicopter to crane the materials into place. It's an incredibly delicate operation.
Riley crosses the pond to scale three iconic bridges in the U.K. The famed Tower Bridge in London is being restored, and the lead paint being stripped must be contained. In Scotland, he'll construct scaffolding at the top of the Forth Bridge, a vertigo-inducing 367 feet over the water! Just upriver, he helps implement an experimental technique to prevent a suspension bridge from collapsing.
Riley travels to Las Vegas to help high-flying Cirque du Soleil solve a real showstopper of a problem - one of the world's largest, most technologically advanced stages is broken. To make the repair, Riley and team have to lower the 80-ton stage and take a look inside - a process never before attempted. While in Sin City, Riley helps repair some of most amazing spectacles on the Strip, including the world's largest video screen and high-tech water cannons in the Bellagio fountain.
Riley is going to new heights. He'll hang over the edge of Las Vegas' tallest building to fix the X-Scream, a thrill ride on the Stratosphere. One of the critical safety measures needs replacing, and Riley joins the ride's head of maintenance on the very edge of the track, 800 feet above the ground, to make the fix. Then he'll dangle 500 feet over the side of the Hoover Dam to retrieve trash. Upriver from Niagara Falls, he'll hang over an unstable, overgrown cliff to eliminate loose rocks.
An 856-foot-long luxury ship is taking on water, and no one knows exactly why. Riley heads to San Francisco Bay, where a team of specialists have just 15 days to pull this mega-ship out of the water, tear it apart, dive into its belly and find the leak. They'll need to work around the clock, because in just two weeks more than 2,000 paid guests arrive for the vacation of a lifetime! Reputations and a boatload of money are on the line.
WTF rides the rails in the City of Brotherly Love. While there, Riley teams up with crews of the nation's fifth largest public transportation system, Philadelphia's SEPTA, to find out what it takes to keep 2,200 miles of tracks safely running. The team must replace a three-mile section of 80-year-old high-voltage wire. It's a risky operation, with live wires just an arms reach away. Then, Riley heads to the garage to work on a train with a malfunctioning automatic control system.
The Bay Bridge joining Oakland and San Francisco made headlines in 2009 when it was shut down for a major renovation. To make the fix, Riley joins the engineering team tasked with cutting a football field-sized section of roadway from the bridge and replacing it - in just 72 hours! With traffic halted and the world watching, the team encounters some unexpected challenges. A crack puts the operation on hold and requires custom-made colossal steel brackets. The clock is ticking.
In Utah, Riley joins a crew of more than 300 engineers, contractors and laborers as they gamble on an innovative installation technique: demolishing a crumbling concrete bridge and installing a new throughway bridge in just four days (WTF!). This fix involves huge remote-controlled trailers, enormous hydraulics, and a 4 million-pound, five-lane bridge that must be transported almost two miles before it is installed in one piece on Interstate 80 in Salt Lake City.
A fishing boat that ran aground in the treacherous Bering Sea is potentially a rusty death trap for the thousands of seals soon to arrive for mating. Sean Riley joins a crack crew of salvage operators who have only a few weeks to strip down and slice the boat into bite-sized bits. The rusty steel has to be removed by a jury-rigged cable stretched from a crane, because vehicles are forbidden on the ecologically sensitive beach.
How do you safely drop a 25-ton metal structure 40 stories ... smack bang right in the middle of a city? Not only must San Antonio's rusty 90-foot-tall TV antenna be precisely cut apart and come down, but the crew must also lift and assemble a crane built from the old antenna itself. Riley teams up with a bunch of high-altitude riggers to get a bird's-eye view of one of the most dangerous fixes he's ever been on.
Three days, one 300,000-pound bridge, two buildings, and mere inches to spare - there is no room for error on this next-to-impossible fix, as Riley helps lift a bridge between two buildings. Working in downtown Salt Lake City - with a commuter train running through the worksite, power lines all around, and five stories of parking garages below - two massive cranes will work in tandem, and all work has to be done in the dead of night.
Building the Wildebeest - the world's longest water roller-coaster - is like assembling an enormous, jigsaw puzzle. The Wildebeest is fitted with special magnetic motors that enable the giant coaster carts to literally float on air. After assembling hundreds of meters of this water ride, moving the giant platforms and towers that support it, and securing enormous pieces of piping, it all comes down to a few critical centimeters as the team struggles to move the last massive pipes into place.
Follow master rigger Sean Riley to the Mojave Desert, where he teams up with NASA for one of the biggest fixes yet: the DS-114 Mars Antenna. This antenna has supported space science since 1966, but after working 24/7 for decades, it needs to be shut down for major repairs. We'll get under the hood of this nearly 7-million-pound giant to switch out a critical part of the enormous hydrostatic bearing, allowing it to resume its accurate tracking capabilities.
