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World's Toughest Fixes
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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.
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Aug 25 2011 |
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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.
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Oct 21 2010 |
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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.
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Oct 14 2010 |
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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.
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Oct 07 2010 |
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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.
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Sep 30 2010 |
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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.
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Jun 24 2010 |
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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.
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Jun 17 2010 |
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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.
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Jun 10 2010 |
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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.
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Jun 03 2010 |
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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.
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May 27 2010 |
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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.
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May 20 2010 |
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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.
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May 13 2010 |
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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 backcountry 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.
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May 06 2010 |
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Sean faces one of his most spectacular fixes to date as he repairs a giant magnet at the Large Hadron Collider with success paving the way for scientific breakthrough, while failure means a potential catastrophe.
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Jul 30 2009 |
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The John Day Dam outside of Portland, Oregon is a huge producer of electricity and a key portal for goods on their way from the Pacific Northwest to Asia and beyond. But if the goods cant get through here, traffic on the entire Columbia River comes to a screeching halt. So with a gate on the dams lock broken, billions of dollars in commerce is on the line and weve got to do something about it. There are nine locks along the Columbia River, and watercraft cant make it through the dams without them. These water elevators can be operated with the touch of a button, providing a simple way for crafts to navigate the differing water levels on either side of a dam. But for eight months, the John Day has been getting by with a temporary fix a caisson that can be moved in and out of place to allow watercraft through. Its a labor-intensive solution, one that takes three times as long as a working lock. Were about to change all that. The gate on the John Days lock is finally ready to go in, and were going to follow the process from start to finish.
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Jul 16 2009 |
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Riley joins a crew lifting a 50 ton boiler 160 feet up a tower and suspending it above 24,000 mirrors - completing America's first large scale solar power tower.
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Jul 09 2009 |
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Riley travels to Portsmouth, R.I., where residents are setting up a 115-ton wind turbine that will provide years of clean energy. The constant blowing wind will fuel the rubine, but how do you raise giant blades in the midst of these unpredictable winds?
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Jun 18 2009 |
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Witness a high-stakes repair job as Sean Riley and a crew of 100 highly trained men and women shut down the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline�the only conduit to market for almost 15 percent of the US domestic oil production. This major fix calls for swapping out a 32-ton valve system, but the size of the job is the least of their problems. Crude oil is not just highly toxic�its explosive. Follow the crew as it races to complete the fix in just 36 hours.
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Jun 11 2009 |
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Riley heads into the remote jungle to help a team of rocket scientists and engineers launch a new two-ton satellite with a price tag of more than $1 million into orbit.
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Jun 04 2009 |
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Sean Riley heads to New Orleans to help clear out a massive barge that's become stuck onshore, and get it over to a nearby salvage yard. With a fix that revolves around three hundred tons of shifting metal, Riley has to help put this barge back in the water... without getting crushed in the process.
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Jun 02 2009 |
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Riley joins a team of industrial divers on the Caribbean island of Curacao to salvage and repair the 50-ton rudder of a ship carrying $3 million worth of iron ore.
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May 25 2009 |
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Go on a cruise. They said: In the Bahamas. Itll be a lot of fun, They promised. Mid ocean in the Caribbean, its a race against time. This may be Paradise, but Rileys not on vacation. Hes on his way to a titanic fix. An enormous, 90,000 ton cruise ship is steaming towards one of the worlds largest dry docks. They need to install a new power plant an enormous diesel generator but first they have to land this ship. Thats when the fun starts Then things get a whole lot tougher Its all hands on deck as a huge crew opens the hull pulls out the piping, makes room for a two story addition and struggles to cram a massive new 320 ton generator inside the ship then puts it all back together And in record time! In just twenty days this liner is taking on its next bunch of customers and if the ship is not ship shape theres likely to be a lot of harsh words spoken on board.
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Dec 03 2008 |
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Sean Riley works to fix a faulty TV antenna nearly half a mile in the air. This extreme fix takes strength, teamwork and guts.
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Nov 26 2008 |
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For this tough job, Sean Riley joins a team of engineers to move and clean a 27-foot, 23-ton, $15 million telescope mirror. Here, three telescopes are used together to form the largest combined telescope in the world.
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Oct 15 2008 |
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Sean Riley helps swap out a 38-ton engine on one of the largest ships in the Gulf of Mexico. The fix must be done in the middle of the gulf�and with swells, wind and rain, things can get complicated.
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Oct 08 2008 |
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Sean Riley joins an elite corps of engineers who dangle from a helicopter and work with live power lines carrying a shocking 500,000 volts of electricity.
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Sep 05 2008 |
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Sean Riley joins a team of engineers and mechanics as they attempt to fix a damaged Boeing 767 jet. This is a crucial fix�taking a jet apart and putting it back together is a complex, three-week operation, and the smallest mistake could have huge consequences. As the new guy on the project, Riley is given an unpleasant task to prove his mettle�disconnecting a lavatory tube
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Sep 28 2008 |
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Sean Riley puts on his radiation suit and heads into the radiation zone for his next tough fix, replacing a steam turbine in a nuclear power plant to boost its energy-producing capacity.
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Sep 28 2008 |