"For hundreds of years, they lay in darkness." "Their creators had been destroyed, but their spirit could not be killed." "Gods had built them, some said." "Others insisted..." "they had built themselves." "Yet most believed that powerful spirits protected the vast stone city deep in the Cambodian jungle." "And woe would come to whomever disturbed its slumber." "Centuries apart, two men would fall under Angkor's spell." "One was a naturalist, lured by tales of exotic creatures and a fabulous lost city." "The other was a diplomat, sent to demand tribute from a civilization far richer than he'd ever imagined." "Their epic tales would inflame the world's curiosity, and light a fire in the darkness of Cambodia's lost world." "The mystery of Angkor is what is not known." "We don't know much about the people." "Think about it with people, when it was filled with worshippers, the community were out in the fields growing rice." "What was it like when it was active and alive?" "It's absolutely extraordinary, the mystery is basically what is this thing?" "Why is it so big?" "Why is it glittering in the sun like this?" "What's it for?" "It's mysterious, you feel that something went on here that's not going on there today, but something went on there that's different from much of the rest of the world." "In Southeast Asia, an abandoned city sprawls magnificently across the heart of Cambodia." "Its hundreds of monuments contain more stone than the Egyptian Pyramids, and cover more ground than modern Paris." "This is Angkor, the capital of an empire that once controlled most of Southeast Asia." "They were called the Khmere." "And more than five hundred years ago, they vanished" "To the outside world, the city existed only in obscure travelers' tales." "Until a Frenchman in the 19th century brought Angkor to light." "He was a naturalist, searching for unknown species of plants and animals." "Almost by accident he uncovered one of man's greatest creations." "In the 1850's Frenchman Henri Mouhot might have been well on his way to becoming the world's first wildlife photographer." "A naturalist and a portrait painter," "Mouhot dabbled in the new, devilish art of photography." "Mouhot was a born roamer" " By age 30 he'd crisscrossed Europe and Russia." "But it was the tales of those who ventured further abroad that would lure him to the jungles of Cambodia." "A book had just been published in 1857 about the area of Southeast Asia." "In a sense it was the focus that drew him." "The first Europeans to explore Africa and Asia were usually marginal people in their own societies." "They didn't quite fit in." "And so they went to these other places and explored them." "But in the process of exploring them, they opened up new areas, wrote about them, and provided the raw information that the European countries needed to exploit these areas as colonies." "In 19th century Europe, models for undaunted courage were heroic explorers, like Henry Morton Stanley." "While searching for the source of e Nile," "Stanley watched most of his companions die of fever and warfare with hostile peoples." "Stanley lost 60 pounds and his hair turned white." ""We have wept so often we can weep no more," he wrote." "But there was one more blow ahead." "In his absence his fiance had married another man." "For late 19th century explorers, it was all in a day's work." "What they lost at home they hoped to doubly gain abroad... as the front-line troops of a new surge of colonialism." "The revolution in manufacturing that would transform Europe was fueled-in part-by adventurism abroad." "Great Britain, France, and Germany had developed huge appetites for raw materials and markets for their products." "This set off a land grab for Asia and Africa, where minerals, farmland, even labor could be taken by force of arms." "They also wanted to bring European culture to the peoples of these regions." "It was a sort of cultural imperialism." "They wanted to, in a sense, bring what they considered the best culture in the world to people who they thought had inferior cultures." "These allegedly 'inferior' cultures weren't always happy to see the Europeans." "Along with hostile armies, explorers had to battle disease, madness, and starvation." "Some were military men who brought much-needed professionalism to the trade." "Others were doomed amateurs brimming with enthusiasm..." "Henri Mouhot would take his place among these." "Mouhot decided to devote his life to studying new species of flora and fauna." "It seemed likely he'd combine his passions, and become history's first photographer of wildlife." "But fate stepped in." "He met and married an Englishwoman, Anna Park." "She was a relative of one of the great explorers of West Africa," "Mungo Park." "Perhaps Anna pressed Henri to match Mungo's feats of daring" " Or maybe Henri wasn't suited for domestic life." "For less than two years after they were wed," "Mouhot set out for Southeast Asia." "Mouhot intended to keep a diary of his adventure while documenting the natural world." "But on his quest for facts, he'd encounter a profound mystery... an abandoned city in the jungle... a rival among the greatest creations of man." "On the 27th April, 1858 I embarked at London, in a ship of very modest pretensions..." "Mouhot books passage on a small boat." "The very first part of this trip was bad." "The boat was small, the captain was drunk all the time and he writes of his perils on the ship and the passengers being sick." "Mouhot is really interesting to me because he went there without a clearly defined program." "He was also went there on his own funding." "In a sense he took a real chance but there was just this wanderlust." "This, this chance to open up a new area to the rest of the world and he in a sense seized the moment." "After pausing in Singapore and Paknam," "Mouhot recovered his land-legs in Bangkok, famous in Europe as 'the Venice of the East. '" "At Bangkok's Royal Palace, the Frenchman dined with Siam's monk-turned-monarch, King Mongkut." "The cultured king grilled Mouhot for news of Europe." "He'd become an expert in foreign affairs, in order to defend his nation." "While countries around Siam fell to European powers," "Mongkut would sign trade treaties with many of them, knowing that this would discourage any one from invading his kingdom." "To teach English to his children, he'd hire the tutor Anna Leonowens." "Her memoirs would inspire the musical The King and I." "Its clownish portrait of Mongkut would become the modern world's sole impression of a ruler who almost single-handedly saved Siam from colonization." "Mongkut's gifts were all but lost on Mouhot as well." "Barely acquainted with Asia, he was distracted by its 'peculiar' customs." "Every inferior crouches before a higher in rank." "He receives his orders with abject submission and respect." "The whole of society is in a state of prostration..." "Despite such attacks on his sensibilities," "Mouhot relished his journeys by boat and even elephant through uncharted regions of Siam, and in time, to the frontier of Cambodia." "He was warmly received by lesser kings, and met with enthusiastic curiosity by all those unaccustomed to having a farang, or white man, parade into their midst." "Mouhot wasted little time on making friends;" "his goal was Science." "My principal object... is to benefit those who in the quiet of their homes delight to follow the poor traveler who with the sole object of being useful to his fellow man... crosses the ocean and sacrifices family, comfort, health," "and all too often their life itself." "Nature has her lovers, and those alone who have tasted them know the joy she gives." "In the 19th century, the science of natural history was in its infancy;" "studying exotic species meant shooting them, or dunking them alive in jars of spirits." "Mouhot's zoological treasure included seven types of mammals, ten reptiles, eight freshwater fish, fifteen land shells, and a spider." "The spider still bears his name." "While Asia's animals enchanted Mouhot, its people bewildered him." "Their languages were gibberish to his ears" " Their religion had many spirits, not one." "The people played music in alien keys, and filled their dances with nightmarish creatures." "Yet the cultural divide that separated Mouhot from his hosts was about to be crossed... by the most unlikely of people." "When Mouhot traveled throughout southeast Asia, he employed several helpers who went with him." "Mouhot became attached to one particular manservant called Phrai." "He even helped him with some of his collecting." "He was a guide, he was an interpreter, he said up the camp." "Phrai started out as a servant of Mouhot, but became his comrade and his constant companion." "In fact we owe to Phrai our knowledge of the expeditions of Mouhot." "On his expeditions" "Mouhot kept meticulous records of plants and animals, and made charts of rivers and mountains unheard of in Europe." "He catalogued the peoples he encountered, noting differences in their looks and customs." "He turned himself into a one-man research team." "And, in the tradition of great explorers before him, he suffered..." "Insects are in great numbers - several of my books and maps have been almost devoured in one night" "We suffered terribly from mosquitoes," "and had to keep up the incessant fanning to drive off these pestilent little vampires." "There is a small species of leech... you have to be constantly pulling them off you by the dozens... but you are sure to return home covered in blood." "Scorpions, centipedes, and above all, serpents, were the enemies we most dreaded..." "But remarkably, while Phrai and the native bearers were frequently ill," "Mouhot's health couldn't have been better." "I drank nothing but tea, hoping by abstinence from cold water from all wine and spirits, to escape fever." "In spite of the heat, the fatigue, and the privations inseparable from such a journey," "I arrived among the Cambodians in perfectly good health..." "The people flocked to see my collection, and could not imagine what I should do with so many animals and insects..." "I offered the children my cigar-ends to smoke, in return for which they would run after butterflies and bring them to me uninjured." "Once more in boats, the Frenchman and his companions journeyed north." "Their destination" " The rumored lost city of Angkor, which interested Mouhot less than the rare birds he hoped to collect there." "On the way they paused at a lonely wilderness outpost" " A Catholic mission run by a French priest." "Years of isolation, and dysentery, had soured the priest's view of the tropics, and made him gloomy about Mouhot's final push to the lost city." "Do you know where you're going?" "The rains have begun and you are going to almost certain death, or will at least catch a fever, which will be followed by years of languor and suffering." "May God be with the poor traveler!" "Mohout said he'd abide by God's will but was going nonetheless." "After another leg of his river journey he reached a landmark he knew only from legend" " The Ton LeSap Lake, and marveled as the shorelines grew apart by some five miles." "By now it'd been more than a year since Mouhot had dined in Bangkok's Royal Palace." "Rough travel had left him ill-prepared for what he was about to see," "a vision few Europeans had shared." "The lost city of Angkor was not a rumor, but overwhelmingly real." "There are ruins of such grandeur, remains of structures which must have been raised at such an immense cost of labor, that at the first view, one is filled with profound admiration, and cannot but ask what has become of this powerful race," "so civilized, so enlightened, the authors of these gigantic works!" "He came looking for insects, came looking for flora, fauna, new species." "He didn't come looking for Angkor but he found it and I think if any of us who may have stumbled on Angkor as he did would have been excited." "But whether we could have recorded it in such detail with such precision as Henri Mouhot did is unlikely." "One of these temples... a rival to that of Solomon, and erected by some ancient Michaelangelo - might take an honorable place beside our most beautiful buildings." "It's grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome!" "The natives enlightened the stunned Mouhot- it's the work of angels, they said, or giants." "It was built by a magician-king." "It built itself." "Mouhot was not an archeologist, nor an art historian, nor could he read the Sanskrit engravings that adorned the monuments of Angkor." "Yet he was an illustrator." "With his customary zeal he set out to sketch the most magnificent of the lost city's some 1,000 temples, and describe them inch-by-inch." "The west side the gallery is supported by two rows of square columns," "on the east, blank windows have been let into the wall, with balconies of twisted columns fourteen centimeters in diameter..." "In the center of the causeway are two elegant pavilions, one on each side, having at each extremity a portico thirty-three meters sixty-six entimeters in length..." "Mouhot was a very keen observer." "He was a collector of information." "He had this natural history background to describe things in a very careful way." "So when he found the monuments at Angkor, he went ahead and approached them in the same way he would approach his zoological specimens, with careful description." "The vaulted ceilings of the galleries are raised six meters from the ground;" "those of the second roof are four meters thirty centimeters high..." "The bas-reliefs represent combat and procession..." "Fabulous animals are busy devouring some;" "others are in irons and have had their eyes put out." "He could tell that it was the results of an ancient civilization that had flourished in this area." "He could also tell by the inscriptions on many of the, many of the monuments - they were mostly in Sanskrit and old Khmere." "He could tell by these inscriptions, even though he couldn't read them, that these were a very learned people who had built all this and yet they were gone without a trace." "Sad frailty of human things!" "How many centuries and thousands of generations have passed away, of which history will never tell us anything." "What treasures of art will remain forever buried beneath these ruins." "How many distinguished artists, kings, and warriors are now forgotten." "Mouhot was deeply frustrated by the mystery of who had created the city of Angkor." "He noted the similarity between the faces in the carvings and the people living in the surrounding forests." "But he couldn't bring himself to believe that these Cambodians were descended from Angkor's peerless artists." "In fact, the artistry of Cambodia had never died." "Though it never again reached the heights of Angkor," "Khmere art flourished throughout Southeast Asia." "Demand for replicas if its most famous works grows with Angkor's fame." "Oblivious of Cambodia's past, Mouhot saw France in its future." "Only a full scale takeover, he concluded, could correct the nation's 'deplorable' condition." "The sooner the better." "European conquest wise and protecting laws, and experience would alone effect the regeneration of this state." "I wish France to possess this land, which would add a magnificent jewel to her crown!" "Though Mouhot wouldn't live to see it," "France did intervene soon after his expedition, making Cambodia a protectorate in 1864." "It would last nearly a century." "Mouhot's diary wasn't the cause." "But like explorer's tales before, it fueled interest and imitation." "King Mongkut's tutor," "Anna Leonowens, was so moved by Mouhot's description of Angkor she'd later copy it for her own book." "Angkor was never a lost city in Asians' eyes." "They knew about it and from the 16th century onwards," "Jesuit priests wrote it in their diaries." "It's just that their diaries were so confidential it didn't reach a wide public." "Mouhot was the first person to popularize Angkor." "And it was his sketches, his descriptions that really is why he was credited with the discovery of Angkor." "With a saber in one hand, Phrai pursues the fishes in the stream." "He and his shadow reflected on the rocks and water might easily be mistaken by the natives for demons." "It is pleasant to the man devoted to our good and beautiful mother Nature to think that his work, his fatigues, his troubles and dangers, are useful to others." "I doubt not others will follow in my steps, and gather an abundant harvest where I have but cleared the ground." "Mouhot had been traveling for the better part of three years." "The amateur enthusiast had become an expert naturalist, a skilled outdoorsman, a hardened explorer." "He treated Phrai and his other servants as his family, whom he alternately nursed and scolded, and with whom he shed tears at parting." "Yet even as his letters home turned wistful and sentimental, and his journey stretched from two years to three, he couldn't seem to turn back." "Only on the trail was he at peace." "Do not be anxious when you think of your poor friend the traveler, for you know that up to the present time everything has prospered with him." "And truly I experience a degree of contentment, strength of soul, and internal peace, which I have never known before." "But the French priest's dire warning finally came true." "The weather and mosquitoes were the worst yet." "First Phrai fell sick." "For five days we were compelled to remain in the forest;" "it rained a great part of the day, the torrents overflowed." "I never in my life passed such wretched nights." "My poor Phrai was seized with a dreadful fever, and I myself felt very ill." "October 29, 1861." "Overcome by fever the 35 year old Mouhot scratched out his last journal entry." "Have pity on me, oh my God!" "Phrai recovered and made sure his master received a proper burial." "Then he brought Mouhot's possessions out of the forest, and put them on boats for Europe." "Most of the zoological samples the naturalist had collected during his journeys had already been lost at sea." "But his journal made it safely back to England." "Henri's widow Anna persuaded the Royal Geographical Society to publish Mouhot's diary." "The first edition did not sell;" "there were no profits to share with Anna." "Yet, owing chiefly to its description of Angkor," "Mouhot's work remained in print for a full century." "Generations of travelers and explorers have encountered the treasures of Khmere culture with Mouhot's journal in hand." "And perhaps some took heart in one of Henri's last letters home, a fitting epitaph for Mouhot, and his generation of explorers:" "Courage, then, and hope!" "Our perseverance and efforts will be recompensed." "Adieu, adieu, Au revoir." "Do not forget me." "Shortly after Henri Mouhot alerted the world to the wonders of Angkor, the work of recovering its treasures began." "Mouhot's meticulous descriptions had inspired Europe to take a closer look." "But the questions had only just begun." "Who were Angkor's builders, the empire called the Khmere?" "What were their lives like?" "Archeologists had no written record to go on" " Lf the Khmere had chronicled their story, they probably did so on palm leaves and paper." "Time had turned the perishable history to dust." "With nothing known about their builders," "Angkor's monuments seemed destined to hold their tongues forever." "Then in 1902 a remarkable document came to light and a most unlikely voice reverberated across eight centuries." "The fantastic civilization of the Khmere, thought to be forever beyond reach, came to life in all its grandeur." "In about 10,000 words this report captured the heart of the lost kingdom of Angkor." "Its author was a diplomat sent to Cambodia by China's fearsome Mongol Dynasty." "The Mongols are famous for their deadly mounted warriors, and for tactics that routed European armies." "At the end of the 13th century, however, they took aim at Southeast Asia." "In 1286 the Mongols struck deep into what's now Vietnam." "A year later the capital of Burma fell to the hordes." "Yet the infamous horsemen didn't like fighting in the alien jungle terrain" " Perhaps this alone saved Angkor from being next." "Instead, Mongol Emperor Timur Khan gave orders for diplomats to go to Angkor and collect tribute from the Cambodian king." "This would appease the Khan while allowing the envoys to size up Angkor for possible future attack." "One of these diplomats was Zhou Dagoun." "Zhou Dagoun in his writing, never said why he was there." "He was part of an embassy which obviously meant that it was some, trying to check out on trade, check out, get the intelligence on what this kingdom was like." "To show to Mongol Emperor what sorts of people lay at the far boundaries of his empire, what sorts of products they had, what they looked like." "The inhabitants are rude and ugly and very black." "The indigenous women are very lustful." "If a husband has to leave for a distant mission, that's alright for a couple of nights." "But after a dozen nights the woman will certainly complain," ""Who am I, a ghost that needs no one to sleep with?"" "He was a keen observer, telling us about the people, the daily lives." "Zhou Dagoun left us something very special." "He has left the only first hand record that we have of Angkor." "He was here when Angkor was a kingdom." "But we have to always keep in mind he was a foreigner, so he was perceiving the kingdom and what he knew in his background which was Chinese." "About Zhou Dagoun little is known." "He was probably about thirty years old, a diplomat, perhaps an aristocrat." "From the details he reported to the Khan emerge a character fascinated with earthy pleasures." "He came from an obsessive prudish kind of culture and he saw in this tropical climate and enjoyed seeing, women taking off their scanty costumes and getting into the river to bathe with nothing on at all, and he commented on this" "not only because it was so barbarian and rare and un Chinese but I think also because he enjoyed watching the spectacle." "Every three or four days the women go and bathe in a river outside the city." "Even the women from the noble families take part in these baths and aren't ashamed." "Everyone can see them from the to of their heads to the bottom of their feet." "The Chinese, on their day off, go and see it." "I've heard that there are those who enter the water to take advantage of the situation." "The water is always as hot as fire." "For Zhou Dagoun, his year in Angkor would be full of such surprises and contrasts." "He was Chinese, but from the frigid plains, a Mongol whose race worshipped war above all things." "By contrast, the Khmere had embraced Buddhism, and its creed of compassion and rebirth." "The city of one million enjoyed a calendar full of parades, festivals, and holy days." "The Chinese who arrive as sailors find it comfortable that in this country one doesn't have to wear clothes." "And since rice is easy to earn, and women easy to persuade, there are many who desert to stay." "As he catalogued Angkor's marvels," "Zhou Dagoun himself may have thought about deserting for a life in the jungle paradise." "As a spy of sorts, he no doubt soon discovered that all the Khmere's might and majesty largely depended on one thing" " Water." "Three rice-harvests a year fed the city of about one million, and paid for everything from temple building to defense." "To grow the rice, they had to tame the water." "They harnessed the water from the Ton Le Sap Lake by building a series of canals, dikes, and moats from the lake up to the city of Angkor." "During the rainy season, when the lake began to rise water was forced up these canals, up above the city, and collected in large reservoirs, called barays for year-round use." "And in fact the system that was employed at Angkor a thousand years ago is more advanced than any irrigation system used in Cambodia today." "The relationship between the king and water has a very long history." "The whole reason that Angkor is located on this plain is because of the access of water." "So the king could provide fish and rice and therefore his people would prosper and his genealogy would continue." "Not surprisingly the symbol of water-a snake - is key to Khmere faith." "In Angkor, Zhou Dagoun would have found the revered reptile depicted countless times, in scenes said to reveal the secret of immortality." "The churning of the ocean of milk is known in Hindu mythology ...its much loved in Cambodia in their art." "It's depicted with gods on one side and demons on the other and they're holding a large scaly body of a serpent." "They pull left and right and left and right in a way that we would call a tug of war." "They're churning to try to yield the elixir of immortality." "Immortality was a daily pursuit inside the Royal Palace, the abode of Khmere Kings." "Kings had more than a thousand concubines" " The most beautiful women of the empire." "Scores are depicted at the Royal Terrace... no two alike." "Concerning the concubines and the girls of the palace," "I've heard that the number is between three and five thousand." "When in a family there's a beautiful girl, she's immediately sent to the palace." "As a foreigner, and an oddity," "Zhou Dagoun wasn't permitted to enter the Royal Palace... but he heard a legend about the magic that took place inside." "In the Golden Tower inside the palace the sovereign goes to sleep in its highest part." "All the locals assert that inside the tower there's a genie" " Master of the whole territory of the kingdom." "This genie appears every night in the form of a woman." "Its with her that the sovereign lies with and then has sex." "If one night the genie doesn't appear, this is because the time for the barbarian king's death has come." "If the king doesn't show up even for one night, something terrible will happen." "He would comment on some of their unusual customs but then he would always draw comparisons back to the way we do things in China." "So I think he saw commonalties between the Khmer and the Chinese." "In this country it's the women who know about commerce." "If a Chinese arrives here and immediately takes a woman, its because he wants to take advantage of the woman's trading skills, [which could easily exceed his own.]" "Zhou Dagoun disapproved of most Angkor customs but praised one-the status of women." "The envoy noted that women ran commerce throughout the city, and women intellectuals were among the king's most trusted counselors." "Women figure prominently in engravings on a temple at Angkor called the Bayon." "They depict dozens of types of business and the daily activities of Khmere life." "In fact everything the Mongols wanted to know about the Khmere was right here-agriculture, slaves, rare goods." "For Zhou Dagoun it would have been an intelligence goldmine." "Valuable products are the feathers of the kingfisher, elephant tusks, rhino's horn, and beeswax." "The white rhinoceros horn is veined and is the most precious;" "the black one is inferior." "In general, the people of this country are very simple." "When they see a Chinese, they are respectfully frightened and call him "Buddha"." "Seeing him, they throw themselves to the ground and bow low." "From Zhou Dagoun's reports we know about the fact that there were astronomers there." "We know about the fact that, that various groups of people within the court were scientists." "So this was an area of discovery." "This was the Renaissance area of southeast Asia." "More than five centuries before Europe's Renaissance," "Cambodian Michaelangelos sent their masterpieces soaring skyward." "Reliefs at the Bayon acknowledged the builders;" "but one monument at Angkor made them immortal." "The Chinese envoy Zhou Dagoun was probably barred from Angkor's greatest marvel, a funery temple built for a king." "He skipped over it in his report, mentioning only that a Chinese artisan had probably built it." "No doubt the envoy coveted the Khmere's timeless masterpiece" " Angkor Wat." "Over a century before Zhou Dagoun arrived, the last stone was fitted into place." "Archeologists have determined that it took almost thirty years to complete, and was finished in time to bury the king." "Some historians believe Angkor Wat is a funery temple." "The main basis for this is that the entrance is at the west." "In Hindu mythology this signifies death." "When you enter you feel you're moving from the world of man to the world of the deities." "Look to the left." "It's a battle." "It is a battle of war and massacre and slaughter and pillage and fire." "But at the east is the famous story of the churning of the ocean of milk, the beginning of life." "Never in his life would Zhou Dagoun have seen anything like it." "The austere Mongol religion had nothing to compare to sacred mountains of stone." "Angkor Wat was built to please a Hindu god, but came to draw the devout of many faiths." "Climbing the staircase reveals levels of increasing holiness." "Then you continue to the next level." "The walls are bare in total contrast to these reliefs, totally bare walls." "Why?" "Because you look at the top and what do you see but the pinnacle, the image of Vishnu that would have been housed inside this." "And so the bare walls provide a quiet background to carry your eye upward to the very most sacred point of the temple." "According to tradition, priests placed the king's ashes inside the temple he built for himself." "Yet the monarch didn't dwell in the next world alone." "Attending him are 1700 enchanted beings, called Apsaras." "The Apsaras are the celestial nymphs, the beautiful women that fly through the heavens and dance for the gods." "And they stand ready dressed in theirjewelry and beautiful costumes to do whatever the gods would need to make them happy and for the kingdom to prosper." "These celestial nymphs were born simply to please the gods, can you imagine?" "Angkor Wat had hardly claimed its place on the horizon when disaster struck." "Drawn by its increasing splendor the Chams, from what's now Vietnam, attacked and burned the city." "Countless inhabitants were killed, or forced into exhile." "By the time the capital was rebuilt, a sea change had taken place." "His people had suffered... so the king built a walled city, Angkor Tom, to protect them in time of war." "Like their king most of the Khmere people abandoned Hinduism, and followed in the Buddha's path." "Zhou Dagoun was familiar with Buddhism, a popular religion in China." "But he was awed by its Cambodian face." "Above each gate of the enclosure, there are five big Buddha heads carved in stone, their faces turned towards the four cardinal points;" "at the center is placed one of these heads, but this one is decorated in gold." "It's a kind face, it's a god of compassion and wisdom." "This art feature had never before been seen at Angkor, and in fact there's not a prototype known." "Some say that it represents the king looking in all directions, north-south-east-and west, and that makes him the Ruler of the Universe." "Everyday the king holds audiences for affairs of state." "The king, sword in hand, appears in the golden window." "All present join their hands and touch the earth with their foreheads." "It is plain to see that these people, though barbarians, know what is due to a prince." "Zhou Dagoun arrived in Angkor when its king had undisputed control over an empire of seemingly limitless potential." "Despite his glowing account, his master, Timur Khan never plundered the nation's treasures." "Perhaps Cambodia's climate was too similar to that of Vietnam, where the Mongols had tasted rare defeat." "Or perhaps the Khmere seemed too strong to tame." "Zhou Dagoun may have painted too fine a portrait for invasion." "Maybe Timur decided it wasn't really worth invading." "Or maybe there were plans but other things were happening in the middle kingdom that in a sense blocked any future expansion." "Yet the Khmere's story would soon come to an end whether the Mongol Khan invaded or not." "Archeologists and historians have pieced together the final chapter." "By Zhou Dagoun's time, 22 kings over 500 years had worked the land until it began to fail." "Rice harvests dropped, and stone monument-building... ceased." "Maintenance of the reservoirs and canals suffered." "The kings' sacred covenant with the water... was broken." "Early in the 15th century the kingdom of Siam made profitable raids into Khmere territory." "A climactic battle in 1431..." "brought about the end." "All but abandoned, the Khmere capital was lulled into a centuries-long sleep by the encroaching jungle." "Fortunately, Zhou Dagoun had long since carried his chronicle to safety." "Angkor had won the envoy's admiration, and he repaid it with the only surviving portrait of Cambodia's ancient treasures." "Coming to Angkor for most people is a bit of a pilgrimage to a sacred place." "Somehow it just touches your soul." "Every time you see it looming out of the forest it hits you very, very hard." "The mystery is it doesn't explain itself." "We don't know much except from reports of Zhou Dagoun of how they lived." "Yet, we can still see the monuments they left and we can speculate and we can dream about the greatness of this civilization." "It is a simple mansion, built of stone and irony, a symbol of freedom invested with the labor of slaves and great statesman alike." "It is like no other place on earth, a house alive with the past and present." "I deem this reply a full acceptance of the unconditional surrender of Japan." "...that a strong and a confident and a vigilant America stands ready tonight..." "It is an odd place, where the monumental and the mundane coexist." "to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere... therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow." "It is where the most critical decisions in our history are made." "And where any American can visit." "And all the things that American" "Independence means to you and to me and to ours." "My fellow Americans, our constitution works - here the people rule." "Now you will journey through time and a day meeting the people and hearing the stories that give this powerful place its soul." "For this is more than just an office or a monument or a home, it is an American idea known as the White House." "This isn't the biggest house." "Many and most, in even smaller countries are much bigger." "This isn't the finest house, but this is the best house." "It's the best house because it has something far more important than numbers of people who serve, far more important than numbers of rooms or how big it is, far more important than numbers of magnificent pieces of art." "This house has a great heart, and that heart comes from those who serve." "At the White House, there is no such thing as a typical day" "For those who serve inside, today will be one of the most intense." "These people, stagehands to history are preparing the house for the visit of Russian President Boris Yeltsin." "Hi, Brenda, this is Gary Walters at the White House." "How are you today." "Fine." "Is Jerry in?" "Each time a foreign leader visits the White House, the President has an opportunity to showcase the power and heritage of the nation in a setting that embodies them in every wall, floorboard, and stone." "This is the symbol not only of the Presidency, but in the eyes of the world, of the United States of America." "Nothing compares to the simplicity and the strength nothing, nothing in the world like it." "...black tie, the dinner is... will start off with the private reception..." "Very shortly the Yeltsins will arrive." "To insure a flawless visit, there are briefings on the 1000 details of protocol and timing." "Then in terms of the movements, the arrival back here by the car, going up to the stage..." "The high point of the visit will be the state dinner tonight." "Dramatic, entertaining, and essential, the state dinner is the ultimate expression of White House power." "Not a thing." "Not a thing." "Okay, we're gonna start the escorts out to the South Lawn now..." "More than 200 reporters will cover the visit of the Russian leader." "It will begin in a few moments with a carefully orchestrated event called the arrival ceremony." "Will you repeat the name again please." "Ladies and Gentlemen this is an audience check from the South Lawn of the White House." "Checking one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one." "I'm Mrs. Gore." "I'm Secretary Christopher." "Inside the White House, with only minutes to go, the President and the First Lady receive their final briefing." "The only thing I don't remember is what are the cues for down here - both coming and going?" "I hope I don't sneeze..." "Ladies and Gentlemen." "The President of the United States and the First Lady." "The White House is so universally recognized today that it's hard to imagine when it didn't exist." "But almost 13 years after the United States had declared independence, the city of Washington was still nothing but untamed woodlands." "In 1789, Congress agreed to build a new capital city." "Ridiculed in New York and Philadelphia, the city and the President's house would never have been built had it not been for one man." "Washington wanted the city built." "By law it had to be occupied by November 1, 1800 and many forces were acting against this new city in the wilderness." "Washington wanted it, he wanted it in the middle of the country, he wanted it on the Potomac River." "And he was determined in having those buildings, because in having the buildings, he would have his capital." "Its foundations were dug by slaves, the intricate stonework carved by Scottish masons." "More than half the workforce were foreign born." "The workers lived at the job site and each morning received a lb." "Of meat and all the cornbread they could eat." "After one especially randy night there, the commissioners overseeing the project closed down the only house of prostitution to have ever operated on the White House grounds." "When it was finished, it was immense;" "a bigger home would not be built in this country until after the Civil War." "Today, the power of the symbol is inescapable, something every visiting leader learns upon arriving." "At that moment I become the United States and he becomes Russia." "And we stand for all of our people." "And if this state visit goes well, then it's proof that the Cold War is really over." "And we're making a newer and better world." "And I don't want to mess it up." "I want to do it right, because it's the United States." "Conceived by President Kennedy in 1961, the modern ceremony not only impresses the visiting leader, it gives him the distinction of being welcomed here." "Together we have agreed to safeguard nuclear materials and to shut down plutonium production reactors." "Together we can and we will make a difference not only for our own people but also for men, women, and children all around the world." "The receiving line's going on right now inside." "The President and Mrs. Clinton are receiving the official party." "We have a full day, full slate in front of us." "We have some canopies to put up yet, flower material to put around, there's a lot of activities going on, yeah." "See ya later." "All right, Jim what else you got?" "In the White House basement, the first preparations for the state dinner are underway." "Here the butlers will find some of the 1,500 different pieces of china to set tonight's tables." "It's one of a hundred different tasks the White House staff will finish in their push to the dinner, now ten hours away." "Upstairs, in the entrance hall, a receiving line welcoming the Russian delegation is concluding." "Just a few steps away, the china is wheeled into the old family dining room." "The White House is barely large enough to hold a dinner like the one planned for tonight." "So this elegant room has been converted into a giant pantry so butlers like Buddy Carter can serve tonight's 150 guests." "There are so many people that are capable of doing this job, but I'm one of the few selected that get to do it." "So I take a lot of pride in what I do and I love it." "Can I speak to Jim please?" "Chief Usher Gary Walters is the house conductor." "He directs everyone from butlers to plumbers, all the people who serve the family and make the house work." "Although he built the house," "George Washington died before it was finished." "John Adams, intimidated by the expense of running such a home, said he'd prefer a row house instead." "But Washington's house held irresistible allure, and on the night of November 1, 1800," "Adams became the first President to sleep in the White House." "Well, he woke up the next morning and he wrote a letter to his wife." "It seemed to settle in on him." "And it's really, you might say, the first experience, you know of a President having in that house and see by now it is the President's house." "It seems almost an afterthought, it was very beautiful, when he says, you know, may heaven bestow the best of blessings on this house and may none but honest and wise men inhabit it hereafter." "When the Johnsons entered the White House, the nation was still in mourning for President John Kennedy." "One of the times that was a throat gasping time for me was the morning of a December the 22nd, when I came down to the first floor where all of the chandeliers had been draped in black net," "and to come back and see that gone and the Christmas tree brilliantly alight," "I think we had it in the Blue Room." "That was just a..." "you just gasp with sort of a relief, and now we are started, and life will go on." "For the first families, from the moment they move in, life goes on in the public eye." "For their own sanity, there must be a refuge and at the White House it is upstairs." "Only above this stair is privacy absolute." "Never, while the Presidential family is in residence, may cameras pass beyond this gate." "Cameras above the first floor are still rare, because this is where the families live." "The second and third floors are one of the few places on earth where the families are not accompanied by Secret Service." "At the heart of the second floor is the Yellow Oval Room which leads to the Truman Balcony." "These rooms provide a haven, a place safe from everything but history." "For me, I would get so caught up in what I was doing that you forget where you are..." "that this is home." "But then we'd sit down at dinner at night and here would be Abraham Lincoln's plate, and then it would all just kind of come back, here I am in this historic house, and it was overwhelming sometimes." "While overwhelming, this public housing does come with some useful amenities." "Living in the White House is quite a dream for any homemaker." "There's somebody to do everything, and it's not just the wonderful butlers and maids, but if you need a plumber, all you do is pick up the phone and the plumber is there right away." "Well, when President Johnson first came into office, the Chief Usher call me up and said the President wants to talk to you about the shower." "He says, "Come up," so I came up." "The President stepped off the elevator coming down going to the Oval Office that morning." "So, he told me he wanted more water, colder water, and he said," ""If I have to, I'll go over to the Elms and take my shower."" "So the first thing I did, I got a chauffeur and went to the Elms to see what he had over there." "And we came back to the White House and we thought we had it, you know, perfect for him, you know." "We had it much better than he had at the Elms." "But, he wasn't satisfied with that." "He wanted 50 degree cold water." "He wanted body sprays around him." "And then he told me that he wanted a showerhead about two feet off the floor." "He said, "I want a showerhead right there."" "I said,"Well, you hold your finger there Mr. President." "Let me mark that spot."" "In your home, probably you have about eight to ten pounds of running pressure on your showerhead when it's running." "His was 110 pounds of pressure while it was running." "It was like a mini-car wash." "The Chief Usher was Rex Scouten." "He said, "I have to try that shower out."" "And it just kind of pinned him right up against the wall." "The employees are like a family because everybody see, you know - it's like you've got different departments and everything like that." "But it's not operated that way." "If you see something that needs to be done, regardless of which department it is, you do it." "That's why we say it's like a family." "I remember one time teasing a member of the staff, one of the butlers, and they are really like family and treated our children like family, and I said, "If you don't behave," "I'm going to get you fired."" "And he burst out laughing and said," ""Presidents come and go, butlers stay."" "In 1945, a young electrician named John Muffler came to work here." "For the last 50 years, in addition to electrical jobs, he has handled the little annoyances of life for ten first families, like replacing watch batteries and fixing eye" " Glasses." "You want to do the Ground Floor, right?" "No one in the history of the House has served here longer." "Am I going too fast for you?" "The man with the longest tenure here, fittingly, also is in charge of time." "Every Friday, Mr. Muffler winds the clocks in every part of the White House." "How many clocks are there in the place?" "Several." "...Mr. President?" "Yes, it's a beautiful clock." "And it still keeps good time." "Do all these clocks run, Mr. President..." "Yes, they all run." "We have a special man who winds clocks every Friday." "I'd always managed to be there when he'd come in somehow, and one morning he said to me," ""Son, do you know why when I come into this office, these pictures are all crooked and all bent out of shape?"" "I said, "No, Sir, Mr. President, unless the cleaners, when they're dusting, they move the pictures around."" "He said, "No, no, no, that's not the reason."" "He said, "Would you like to know?"" "I said, "Yes Sir, Mr. President, I would."" "And he said, "The rotation of the earth causes that."" "And I said, "Yes Sir, Mr. President."" "But he went over every morning and straightened 'em..." "Oh, I love Mr. Muffler." "I can't do anything like program VCRs or set digital clocks and so I'm always needing his help to come to my rescue, but he's a perfect example of the kind of dedicated service that people have given to the White House" "and to Presidents and their families for over 200 plus years." "United Nations War Council." "President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill at the White House..." "Because of what happens here, even in the wee hours of the night, someone is always on call." "Alonzo Fields, White House butler for 2 1 years, developed a unique relationship with Prime Minister Winston Churchill." "Around 1:30, I decided that the Prime Minister satisfied and I was thinking of going..." "really going to bed." "And the bell buzzed." "I went in, the Prime Minister is walking up and down with this scotch in his hand, talking, quoting, and saying different things and he says," ""We're trying to find out from the Russians what we can do for them." "But what can we do?" "It's like an iron shade."" "And then he stopped and stomped his foot," ""Oh, make that an iron curtain."" "And then he saw me and my eyes saw the bottle was empty." ""My poker face didn't fool you."" "He says, "Yes, my man, I need some more to drink."" "He says, "I have a war to fight." "And I need fortitude."" "So I proceeded and got a bottle of scotch and opened it and poured the Prime Minister a drink and then I said to him," ""Mr. Prime Minister, will that be all for the night?"" "And he says, "I don't know." "I can depend on you."" "And I said, "Well, Mr. Prime Minister, what is it?"" "And he says, "Well, if ever I'm accused of being a teetotaler," "I want you to come to my defense."" "I says, "Mr. Prime Minister, I'll defend you to the last drop."" "It's hard to imagine today, but back in the Madison Administration during the War of 1812, the British Army captured the city of Washington and burned the White House." "The Madisons were trying to keep a cheery face on it all and they had a dinner party." "And some of the most amusing in context letters of the Madison paper are regrets to that particular dinner party that night in August." "Lo and behold, you could hear the gunfire." "Mrs. Madison finally fled herself, left the house alone with Paul Jennings a slave." "Jennings was to bank the fire, ironically, to keep it from burning down." "But the British came in at eleven at night." "They saw the dinner." "The officers sat down and had the dinner." "The furniture was piled up in the rooms with lamp oil on it, the windows broken out." "And about 1 a." "M., the British stood with flaming javelins in a circle around the house and Lieutenant Pratt fired his pistol." "The javelins were thrown in the house and it exploded." "Mrs. William Thornton a British citizen, was there and said," ""It glowed like a great plum cake."" "The White House is reduced to ashes except for the stone walls that General Washington had cherished so." "Upstairs on the Truman Balcony we have one block that's unpainted." "But whenever we have people up there, I take them outside and I look at it, and I say, "You remember this house burned in 1814."" "I look at it all the time, every time we have any kind of international incident." "When Captain O'Grady was rescued out of Bosnia," "I went out on the Truman Balcony and I looked at the burn marks." "But I'm very aware every day I go to work about how this house carries the whole story of America and how we're still creating that story and what our obligations are." "Throughout the day during a state visit meetings between the official delegations are held and the press moves from room to room for photo opportunities." "...." "Care to respond to the health care situation..." "Those living here are surrounded by constant reminders that they are not living a private life." ""I feel as though I have just turned into a piece of public property,"" "Jacqueline Kennedy said after only two months in White House." "Grandpa lives in the big White House in Washington." "And Grandma lives there too." "And there she is with two of the grandchildren... as the entire family goes to the East Room to pose for the News of the Day camera." "The South Lawn has always been the quintessential American backyard something between a playground and a formal garden." "President Wilson kept a flock of sheep here and he also welcomed the first autogiro." "Each morning during the Hoover Administration the Cabinet played an exercise game with an eight-pound medicine ball." "When Ike installed the first putting green, the stage was set for confrontation with the local constituents." "Squirrels have created a nutty problem at the White House with President Eisenhower complaining that the four-legged vandals are tearing up his private putting green." "The President, a very earnest golfer, brought on a mighty political storm with his decision to banish the squirrels, even though nobody has found out whether the animals are Republicans or Democrats." "Well, the South Lawn is well inhabited by squirrels." "And up at Camp David," "I noticed that the oak trees shed acorns to a great extent." "And the squirrels didn't do much about them." "So when the day came to go back down to the White House," "I'd fill my pockets with acorns." "And there, up and down and in the Rose Garden, there would be these squirrels and I'd throw the acorns out to them and you'd see them, wham, they'd just go and grab for those acorns" "One occasion, at Camp David, I didn't get any acorns, and when I came back, well, I went into the Oval Office and we were having a meeting there." "I looked and in every one of those windows, the squirrels were standing on their hind legs and looking through their front legs inside." "And they're looking at me." "And they literally..." "I could see were saying," ""Where are the acorns?"" "At about 3 p." "M., the pianist for tonight's entertainment practices in the East Room." "One floor below, in the White House kitchen, chef Walter Scheib is gearing up for dinner now only five hours away." "In addition to the normal pressure to please, turn-of-the-century chefs ...had to routinely serve seven-course family meals and twenty-course state dinners." "The pleasures of these meals were not lost on President Taft, who tipped the scales at more than 300 pounds." "Though a success in the kitchen, the chef's handy work was causing problems elsewhere." "White House bathtubs proved too narrow for Taft;" "to his consternation the President was frequently left stuck in the tub." "White House ushers were sent scurrying to find a proper vessel." "When it finally arrived, it was 41 inches wide, could hold nearly 65 gallons of water, and all the men who installed it." "Tonight's guests will be served one of the legendary White House desserts, the creation of pastry chef Roland Mesnier." "That goes back." "This is when I am even more nervous than normal." "You have to remember, you know, when you serve a state dinner, who are your guests?" "The dining room is filled with extremely important people, people who have been everywhere, that have tasted all sorts of food, and our job is to make sure that the guests will leave the White House feeling that the President and Mrs. Clinton did an excellent job" "receiving the guests, not the pastry chef, no, or anybody else, but that the President and the First Lady." "That has to be very well understood." "I think if you can do that, then I think you do your job very well." "Mesnier's almond baskets will be the dinner's grand finale." "It's the type of culinary touch that has always attracted the attention of gourmets, including Julia Child." "While history has recorded the names of almost every White House chef, the names and lives of the kitchen assistants and the servants who toiled on the staff have gone largely unrecorded." "In 1909, Mrs. Taft considered firing all of the white ushers because they couldn't be treated like servants in the same way as blacks." "She was persuaded not to." "Despite the discrimination, black Americans who worked here then created a vibrant world." "Their White House positions placed them in the upper strata of Washington's black society." "James Coats, Adolph Bird, and Arlen Dixon," "I remember the first three butlers I met during the Tafts Administration." "Lillian Rogers Parks, a White House seamstress for 30 years, was introduced to that society by her mother, Maggie Rogers, a maid to Mrs. Taft." "They had their homes and they entertained and then we had clubs." "That was very classy." "And that gave them the idea to get together and have a little a club at the White House called the Chandeliers." "Named for the cut glass fixtures in the East Room, the Chandelier Club, like many social clubs in the early 1900s, held a ball each year." "Though it was not staged there, the White House imprimatur made the Chandelier Ball exclusive." "The Marine Band played and White House dignitaries always attended." "But outside the ball, black workers were still treated as second-class citizens." "In 1902, President Teddy Roosevelt invited the noted educator," "Booker T. Washington, to the White House for dinner." "Press reaction in the South and the North was severe." "Roosevelt was chastened." "No black American received another social invitation to the White House for 28 years." "In the entrance hall, the honor guard practices for their ceremonial march later this evening." "They are performing a kind of ritual that helps define what has become a national shrine." "For the occupants of the late 1800s, the White House was too small and not nearly grand enough for the nation's aspirations." "There were frequent and elaborate plans to expand or even abandon it." "I don't think the White House would have survived the late 1860s, had it not been where Lincoln had lived." "You think of Lincoln in his nightshirt going down the hall at night with the wind blowing and his dreams that his secretary sold him out, and his wife's problems, the child's death." "And it all happened in the White House." "And it's from the White House he left in his carriage to go to Ford's Theater and it was to the White House he was brought back dead." "It's not too excessive to say that Lincoln sanctified the White House." "Now those..." "this is what we call pull sugar, which is simply water, glucose and lemon juice..." "With only hours to go before the evening begins, pastry chef Roland Mesnier is finishing tonight's culinary grand finale." "Until you feel that you are..." "that the ribbons is wide enough because as you pull it thin, it will get narrow on you." "That's... just like a baby, very, very careful, you have to kind of have to tickle it and massage it and be nice to it." "See, look at these." "Precision and timing is the key to beautiful ribbons." "It makes you very nervous because of the kind of material we're using." "Some as you can see shatters just like this." "And, you know, one touch, and that's it." "One wrong move, in the corner of the dough." "So I think every state dinner I age about two or three years." "Mesnier's creations represent the sophistication of the White House staff." "But it wasn't always this way." "At the end of the 19th century, the President's house reflected the manners of a frontier nation, not the style of an emerging imperial power." "It was a home comparable to many other residences from its beginnings, and then enormous demands came upon it and we've had a rather imperial community come to Washington." "General Grant, goodness, he went out and got an old orderly in the military that was a friend of his to come be the chef." "And they had a state dinner and here, apple pie came out and big slabs of roast beef with gravy dripping off of the plates and Mrs. Grant was mortified." "These ambassadors didn't know what to do with it - get on the floor and chew it or what." "By 1902, a brilliant young man named George Cortelyou had changed all of that." "At Roosevelt's request, he created an almost regal White House style that redefined the house for the new century." "As part of the new look, Teddy Roosevelt officially changed the name of the mansion:" "the new letterhead read simply:" ""White House, Washington."" "As part of Teddy Roosevelt's re-invention of the White House, he added a new wing." "It is in this Wing, not in the house itself, that the most famous room in America stands:" "The Oval Office." "Frankly... and definitely there is danger ahead." "Danger against which we must prepare." "We are now prepared to destroy, more rapidly and completely, every productive enterprise the Japanese have in any city." "We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communication." "It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba... against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States." "Because of the history that has been made here, the White House is the most potent symbol of power in the world." "Inside the symbol with only an hour before the first guests arrive, the White House staff is in a whirl of final preparation." "No, no, no." "They greet these people here..." "Each of the head people:" "The tables have been set up very well." "I've personally checked them..." "I hope there's nobody here." "It's those mundane chores that have to be done." "That's part of what the evening's about ...is part of setting a mood as well as entertaining guests." "We're trying to set a mood which is a nice pleasant evening for everybody." "Since any of these plates could be the President's, each has to be perfect." "Though each guest eats the same meal, everyone doesn't get to dine with the President." "All of tonight's 151 guests will not fit in the State Dining Room so some of them will have to eat here in the Ground Floor Map Room." "To the Russians who have been relegated here, someone may have to explain the American concept of "the kids table"" "You gotta know what you're doin'." "Not just anyone can serve the President and his guests." "Besides careful training, each of these waiters has undergone an FBI background check." "The State Dining Room, like the rest of the house, is ready, but Gary Walters isn't taking any chances." "If the Chief Usher had made a similar inspection of the House 45 years ago, he would have found a few things out of place." "In 1948, the White House was completely gutted." "The floors that Jackson, Lincoln, and two Roosevelts had walked across were gone." "After five years of demolition and construction, the White House was res rebuilt." "The inside of the house was put back exactly as before." "Though it was now constructed of steel and concrete," "Jefferson and Lincoln would have easily recognized their old home." "And the idea is preserved." "That's really what it is." "The idea of the house and the symbol is bigger than any material part of it." "And that has remained intact and is really more powerful than ever today." "By the time the President and First Lady reach the first floor, everything is ready." "All the preparations have led to this moment;" "now all they need are guests." "At night, it's a very different thing than what happens at the beginning of the state visit." "We will have worked all day long." "And the visit will either have been a success or a moderate success or maybe not so successful, but what you want to do at night is to simply seal the best possible relationship you can between the leaders of the countries." "So at night you really just want them to enjoy themselves, you want them to have a good time at the dinner, to say what they want to say at the toast and just be glad that they can be there." "In the family's private quarters on the seldom seen Second Floor of the White House, one of the most critical moments of the visit unfolds." "Here, the President and First Lady have a chance to relax with their guest in the warm atmosphere of a home." "The press waits at the foot of the Grand Stair where in a moment one of the most formal ceremonies of the state visit will occur:" "the Presidential entrance march." "Ladies and Gentlemen, President of the United States and Mrs. Clinton, accompanied by the President of the Russian Federation and Mrs. Yeltsin." "The receiving line is charged with excitement because famous as the guests may be, they are about to meet the two most powerful men in the world." "The rising anticipation of the evening is peaking by the time the official toasts are made." "President Yeltsin's should be finishing any minute now." "He's going a couple a minutes over his five minutes." "He's up to about eight minutes now of speaking." "And finally, dinner begins." "While dinner continues upstairs, downstairs, the staff is battling back an avalanche of dishes." "Working hard." "Working hard." "Cocktails is serving." "After the cocktails that's when it starts flowing in." "Start coming down and after that, it's nonstop." "Do you kind of forget where you are?" "No, no." "You know you're in the kitchen washing and drying dishes." "At the top of the winding stair that connects the two worlds, days of work are about to payoff for pastry chef Roland Mesnier." "If you are hungry enough, you can eat the whole thing, yes." "On evenings like these, dinner is followed by a performance in the East Room." "During the civil rights movement, singer Sarah Vaughan performed here." "At the end of the evening, a staff member found her sobbing in her dressing room." "When asked what was wrong, she said, "Nothing is the matter." "It's just that 20 years ago when I came to Washington," "I couldn't even get a hotel room, and tonight I sang for the President of the United States in the White House- and then he asked me to dance with him." "It is more than I can stand!"" "Tonight, Diva Kathleen Battle lends her voice to the house." "I think one of the attractions of the White House, one of the things that makes it so precious in our country, is the fact that a family really is living there every day." "That it's a center not only of political power and prestige on a global basis, but has that human touch of individuals enjoying life within those..." "I guess you might say, hallowed halls." "Tomorrow it will start all over again and every day for as long as there is a republic." "Families will come and go, just as butlers and maids do, dignitaries and old gentlemen who wind clocks." "These are the people who furnish this house and give it life and as they do, an American idea endures." "Some call it the "White Death"" "and an ancient riddle asks, what flies without wings, strikes without hands and sees without eyes?" "Every year more than a million avalanches fall world wide." "Avalanches are simply part of our planet's natural order." "It is only when we get in their way that tragedy strikes." "Utilizing unique methods, we continue our quest to better understand the dynamic power of raging snow." "But the magic of the mountains lures us... more and more place themselves in harm's way." "My machine just moved over me and everything just started moving and I just yelled." "I just screamed "Help me God." "My whole life's flashing in front of my eyes." "You go to inhale and you were just inhaling a mouthful of snow." "I was sure I was gonna die." "They're not to be trusted." "They're awesome terrible things." "They'll rip you to shreds." "They'll Maytag ya." "Something we need to learn something about." "Annapurna in Nepal, one of the most dangerous mountains in the world." "October 15, 1997." "Brothers Jose Antonio and Jesus Martinez Novas, veteran mountain climbers from Spain plan to ascend over 26,000 feet to the summit." "Cameraman Allejandro Rocha is to record their departure from Camp 2 and then await their return." "Recent storms have left deep snow on the mountain side." "It is slow going as the brothers set off to establish Camp Three some 3000 feet higher on the peak." "An hour after they begin to climb they are just two tiny dots on the face of the mountain... as Allejandro shoots video from the tent." "As he faces death." "Allejandro captures a final self portrait." "But just as it reaches the tent, the avalanche is spent." "Allejandro is astonished to find himself alive, but has little hope for his friends." "Are you alright?" "Like specters they emerge from the white eager to tell their tale." "The following day the weather got worse and they were driven off Annapurna." "Some 20 percent of the Earth's land mass is crowned by mountains." "In the Andes, the Caucasus, the Himalaya, the Alps and the Rockies avalanches exert their terrible power." "100,000 fall every year in the United States from Vermont to Alaska." "And here deep in the back country of Alaska..." "Three experts are seeking to photograph the perfect avalanche." "With cinematographer Steve Kroschel, world reknowned avalanche experts Doug Fesler and Jill Fredston, are here both to trigger the snow slide and ensure the safety of Kroschel's film crew." "I realize the power of the avalanche and I try to capture that on film." "I mean it really rouses people." "It stirs in all of us something." "I don't know, primeval." "It's very interesting." "But to get those images," "I must go down into these dangerous zones where the avalanche is going to come down and if I make a mistake, if I'm wrong, it'll cost me my life." "So being with people like Doug and Jill who are experts and know snow safety to a T." "That's what their main objective is to make sure that I don't get killed." "I'm aware of the lighting conditions that he wants." "And I'm aware of the kind of avalanche he'd like to have." "But sometimes I feel like I have to do a little reality check." "Because there's exposure from crevasse fields that are in the run out zone, that people could fall down and have avalanche potential if they're on adjoining slopes." "And so those are the things that I'm looking at." "First and foremost I want to make it a safe spot." "Can we go along this ridge to this little peak where that cornice is just go right along so I can look out." "This is a good spot isn't it Doug?" "Well it's good so far up there." "This kind of concerns me all those seracs up above as far as landing down there." "We'll have to take a look at that." "This is the peak right here." "That should rip out Doug." "I believe it will rip out." "Doesn't that look good to you?" "I don't like it because of the crevasses." "And some of the exposure to some of these chunks of ice up here coming off." "I don't think it's safe." "It takes several hours to find the spot that satisfies everyone." "It looks like we could drop charges right down in that little pocket there where the cornice is." "Doesn't that look good to you?" "Yeah." "Lower 'em in there like it's my unborn son." "One camera is positioned inside a padded steel crash box which is placed directly in the path of the avalanche." "Timing is everything in this mission." "The camera must begin shooting when the avalanche is triggered or it will all be for nothing." "One." "Two." "Three." "Four." "Five." "Six." "Seven." "Eight." "Nine." "Ten." "Eleven." "Twelve." "Thirteen." "Fourteen." "Fifteen." "OK!" "On your mark get set and go!" "Steve positions himself behind a second camera at a safe distance." "Second one out." "Okay keep going... keep going." "Several sticks of high explosives will be used to trigger the avalanche" "Most avalanches are naturally triggered, when the weight of the snow excedes its ability to hold together." "And most of these occur far from human eyes." "I think the usefulness of seeing avalanches in motion is that a lot of the people that we deal with in our avalanche workshops have never seen an avalanche in motion before." "But when they see this thing in motion and they see the power that's associated with an avalanche it's a wake up alarm" "Like the snowflakes they are composed of no two avalanches are alike." "Even very small avalanches can kill, and the big ones are true monsters." "They can attain speeds of over 200 miles per hour... traveling a mile or more on level ground." "No place in avalanche country is entirely safe." "In 1988 the Austrian town of St. Anton which had not experienced an avalanche in over 60 years, was struck just after dawn." "Houses which had stood for almost 400 years were destroyed in an instant." "Remote areas in less developed countries are the hardest hit." "The greatest known avalanche disaster took place in Peru where an ice slide decimated the town of Yungay, killing 18,000 people." "They're awesome terrible things." "They'll rip you to shreds." "They'll Maytag you." "But they're also beautiful to watch, they're delicate, they're graceful, they dance." "They're a double edged sword in that sense." "They're not to be trusted." "Something we need to learn something about." "In the western world most avalanche victims place themselves in the path of danger, and see the mountains as a playground beautiful and benign." "The interesting thing about avalanche accidents is that most of them happen on nice blue sky days." "It's also very interesting to me that roughly 95% of the people who are caught in avalanches are the ones who triggered the avalanche." "And really the question isn't really why is so and so getting caught, it's why did they let themselves get caught, because there's so much knowledge available today that nobody, nobody needs to get caught in an avalanche by accident." "The trap is set over a period of time." "One snow flake is light as a feather." "But the stealthy accumulation of trillions can form massive layers weighing millions of pounds." "What triggers slides can only be discovered by digging into the snow pack." "Doug Fesler introduces a group of students to the deadly archeology of a slab avalanche." "What kind of force is it gonna take to rip it out?" "That's all I really need to know." "First of all do I have a slab?" "I'll start feeling here and I feel resistance as I pull down." "It goes fairly hard to begin with now it's starting to go going a little easier." "A little more resistance again." "Right here a little bit easier." "Right through here is a crust layer." "Now it's very easy right in there." "Another shear plane possibly." "This is a nasty shear plane." "Look how this stuff just falls out of here." "Shear planes allow colossal avalanches to be set off by the slightest disturbance." "We're corroborating the opinion we have about the hardness and weakness of these various layers." "This stuff is so weak it..." "just falls out." "Intermediate faceted snow." "The sugar snow." "More people have probably died in the world as a result of this weak layer than any other weak layer there is." "These snow crystals can be more dangerous than dynamite." "Fluctuations in temperature cause some crystals to lose cohesion and become slippery." "These frozen ball bearings allow everything above to slide." "Notice I have my hand ready just in case." "Okay now we have a free standing column." "Want to make sure the ski is nice and vertical." "See how that came out just like it's spring loaded?" "By integrating all that information together there should be a picture flashing in front of your mind." "And the picture is one of the serious instability that exists from a human triggered point of view." "And so the message there is to stay away from steep leeward smooth slopes because those are the ones that are waiting to eat you." "What I want you to do is on the count of three." "I want you to go." "One." "Two." "Three." "Up in the air punch your heels in real hard." "Ready Banzai warriors?" "One two three." "Banzai!" "An avalanche on the move is a dynamic event, a slab will rip out new slabs, transforming, becoming ever larger, and triggering billowing clouds of powder." "Fortunately, nature can warn of avalanches with subtle sights and sounds." "But if you're hard blasting a 130 horsepower vehicle at 85 miles per hour, it's unlikely that you'll hear or see any of nature's warnings." "Snowmobiles can swiftly invade the heart of avalanche country." "Riders enjoy jetting up a steep incline as high as they can, unwittingly teasing a potential avalanche." "The game is called "high marking."" "Whoever gets the highest wins." "These snowmobilers almost lost it all one morning near Kellogg, Idaho" "A friend videotaped the action as a wall of snow came plunging down." "They would all escape unharmed and spend the rest of the afternoon tempting fate on other slopes." "But in January 1998, three friends exhilerated by a crisp clear day outside of Bend," "Oregon were not so lucky." "It was all virgin snow." "Everything was smooth and just real billowy and soft looking." "And being the first one to make the tracks is kind of a thrill." "That's where you really get your adrenaline going and just let the throttle do what you can with the machine." "And we could get twenty or thirty miles away from anything and see country see a lot of country in a day that was nobody else was around." "The snow just looked like a big a big pillow it was just smooth and soft looking." "When you got on it it would kind of fall apart beneath you because there was nothing holding it from below." "Both Art and I looked at this big clearing off to the right of us." "Art took a couple of stabs at and I watched him go up the mountain or go up the slope." "He must have gone up I don't know," "I'm guessing six seven eight times." "He came down and I decided to go up and I got up on top and I got stuck." "At that point in time I was pretty much stuck like this." "So I got off the low side of my sled and pulled down on my front ski." "My machine just moved over me and everything just started moving." "I was almost to the bottom getting ready to turn around and go back up." "I just got a big push from behind and snow dust everywhere." "And when the dust had gone down enough I turned around." "The snowmobile was buried to the seat and my legs were buried right along with it." "And I turned around and I could see the ski of Brian's snowmobile, but no Brian." "Buried alive, Brian has little more than 30 minutes to live." "And when everything came to a stop it just turned real dark." "My eyes couldn't focus on anything." "And I went into a very frantic time frame." "After trying to get control of the situation and just calm down," "I tried to move anything and everything I possibly could." "I tried to move a finger in my glove inside my glove and I couldn't even do that." "And I ran up to where his snowmobile was and looked around but I didn't see any sign of him." "It's about the most helpless feeling you can have." "You know that there's somebody that needs help and you don't have any idea where they are." "The snow was compressed to my chin like this" "I..." "I could move..." "I felt my cheeks moving and my eye, my eyelids." "I could only move my stomach inward." "I just screamed." "And after I calmed down" "I just remember saying "help me God."" "And we kinda started digging just with our hands within just a minute we realized that that wasn't getting us anywhere." "We could only dig maybe a foot or two deep." "It was just gonna take too long." "So then I figured out that I thought we needed a probe." "And I asked Mark if he had anything and all he had was a saw." "So Mark took off with his saw to find a stick or tree or something that we could use." "When you try to search for something you can move other then your lips and your eyelid you just surrender." "I just remember surrendering." "And I just kind of went to sleep." "I didn't know what else to do." "We were probing close to the snowmobile and started working up the hill, and probably within 10 probes I hit something that felt... ." "it had some elasticity, it wasn't, it didn't feel solid." "And I told Mark I think I have him." "Brian was seconds from dying of asphyxiation not just from the lack of air but from the extreme pressure on his chest" "Barely a few feet down, he might as well have been cast in concrete." "They reached him just in time and learned a lesson they are eager to share." "In retrospect there were some signs." "And had we been as educated then as we are now about avalanches we probably would have recognized them..." "But the basic bottom line I think is just common sense and the awareness." "Being snow smart out there carrying shovels and probes and beepers is a big factor." "I would like to see the people that are gonna go in the back country get some basic survival gear and some basic survival knowledge and just try and be prepared for some of the events that can happen." "Such events have been happening for thousands of years and no one has experienced a longer or more grievous struggle with the avalanche than the stalwart people of the Alps." "In the Great Saint Bernard Pass sits a hospice founded in the 11th century to aid and protect weary travelers." "Today the hospice still welcomes those who come to visit the ancestral home of the legendary Saint Bernard." "In earlier times, both the monks and their dogs quickly responded to travelers in distress." "With their keen sense of smell and massive strength, nothing could stop the noble Saint Bernard from locating avalanche victims." "During the several centuries that the Saint Bernards served at the hospice more than 2000 lives were saved." "But the legendary brandy keg never actually hung around the Saint Bernard's neck." "The tradition originated with 19th century English painters beginning with Sir Edwin Landseer." "The last thing a hypothermia victim needs is brandy." "In World War I, the Alps saw a more sinister response to the danger of the avalanche." "When Austrian and Italian armies met here, each side deliberately triggered deadly snow slides upon the other." "An estimated 40,000 men were lost in this lethal use of nature." "Avalanches are intentionally triggered today... but for an entirely different reason." "Fire in the hole!" "Artillery and explosives are used in preemptive strikes, releasing potential avalanches, preparing the mountains for another kind of invasion" "Each morning before skiers hit the slopes the ski patrol hits them first, to make them safe." "But for some a tamed mountain is not a sufficient challenge." "Extreme skiers seek remote places where the powder is fresh and alive." "In 1996, three of them were shooting an adventure film that almost ended in disaster." "Miraculously, they all survived." "Others filming the glory of unbounded snow sports have pushed the margin of safety a little too far..." "These experts escaped with their lives but near ski resorts, those caught in unsafe areas can find themselves in trouble with the law." "Here in Loveland Colorado, instead of going to jail this avalanche offender chose to be buried alive." "I'm kinda scared right now actually to tell you the truth." "Buried beneath the snow for up to half an hour, he'll have plenty of time to identify with avalanche victims" "And retrieving him is great training for the dogs." "Angel search." "That's good." "Easily the furriest and friendliest part of any rescue effort, rescue dogs often arrive too late to save lives and end up being used to recover bodies" "Humans on the scene are usually the only ones who can help in time." "Therefore avalanche safety schools across the country teach as many as possible the techniques of rapid rescue." "Avalanche "victims" are taught various means of escape and survival, such as using swimming motions to stay on top of the slide and creating a breathing space with their hands before the snow hardens." "Radio beacons are a modern aid to fast rescue." "A transmitter worn by a victim emits a signal that others can home in on." "But the best defense remains avoiding the avalanche altogether." "The danger is well known." "Warnings abound but sometimes they are discounted or ignored." "On January 23, 1998, a French Alpine guide broke all the rules as he led a group of teenage hikers and their teachers off of marked trails near Les Orres in the Alps." "None of them were wearing beacons." "Some of the children slammed into a grove of larch trees they had just walked through." "Their bodies caught in branches and wrapped around trunks." "More than 150 rescuers combed the scene in a heart breaking search for survivors." "Yet it could have so easily been avoided." "The group had discussed avalanches and had even watched a video illustrating the risks." "But when some of the children questioned the wisdom of hiking that day, they were ignored." "The accident gripped the heart of the nation." "Eleven died, nine of them school children." "It was the worst avalanche disaster to hit France in almost 30 years." "89 years ago in the Cascade Mountains of Washington, disaster struck travelers who had never expected to even touch snow." "Number 25, a Great Northern Railroad passenger train is followed by Number 27," "Great Northern's fast mail train." "Heavy winter storms trigger avalanches causing both to stop just before the Cascade Tunnel." "On the following day the tracks are finally cleared and both trains slowly steam through." "The trains are diverted to a side track outside the railroad town of Wellington." "There they remain helpless." "Crews work to clear the tracks but for each foot they clear another falls and the peaks above are a looming white wall." "Without warning an avalanche crashes down from the mountains destroying the cook shack where passengers had eaten the night before." "The tracks ahead and the tracks behind are now completely blocked." "There is nowhere to go." "Five days pass." "Some passengers slog to Wellington for food and comfort, returning to the train to sleep." "A few risk the perilous trek to the next town." "Everyone else remains." "Then on March 1 st around 1:30 am the white death falls hard from the mountain." "A slab a half mile long, and twenty feet deep surges over the tracks" "Rescue workers follow trails of blood in the snow to unearth bodies" "Mothers, daughters, salesmen, sons, lawyers, ranchers, shepherds and miners crushed beyond recognition in the frozen deluge." "The final toll is 96 dead, with 22 survivors" "This remains America's worst avalanche disaster." "In Europe, the threat of such tragedies has hovered over" "Alpine residents for centuries." "Some homeowners fearing what their ancestors called the "avalanche beast"" "have built barrier walls for protection." "A 17 th century church meets the avalanche head on, like a ship plowing through a sea of snow." "One of the best protections is the natural one." "Dense forests of trees can prevent some avalanches and slow others down." "Yet years of mindless deforestation have left some towns hanging precariously on the edge of disaster." "Today as the slow process of reforestation continues, steel and concrete barriers do the work of trees." "Although unsightly and expensive, they offer some protection." "While the search for better methods continues." "With their dense population and mountainous landscape, the islands of Japan are a prime target for avalanche tragedy." "A devastating slide hit near Niigata, in 1986." "It was one of the worst avalanches to hit Japan since World War I I." "This disastrous slide would provid crucial data for scientists in Japan." "Prompting Dr. Kouichi Nishimura of the Institute of Low Temperature Science at Hokkaido University to begin his research on avalanches." "A computer model shows just how the tragic slide progressed." "Here in Sapporo at the sight of the 1972 Olympics, he recreates an avalanche on a small scale to increase his understanding of the internal flow of snow." "Tracking individual particles of snow as they behave in an avalanche is all but impossible." "Nishimura's inspired substitute over 300,000 ping pong balls!" "The behavior of the balls will be fed into a computer to learn more about how hard, how far and how fast an avalanche will run." "Dr. Nishimura hopes to better predict how and where it is safe to build." "In Juneau, Alaska, that lesson has still to be learned." "As the city has expanded into several avalanche paths," "Juneau is a disaster waiting to happen" "Just past 5 am on March 22, 1962 above Behrends Ave in the Highland district... a fast moving avalanche raced down Mt." "Juneau and smashed into the neighborhood below." "Miraculously no one was hurt." "But there was an immediate public outcry." "Yet none of this should have come as a surprise." "Avalanches had fallen in the past and Behrends Ave lies directly in their path." "Studies were commissioned." "Plans were made, but nothing happened." "Mayor Dennis Egan remembers..." "The city and borough of Juneau has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars doing avalanche research, doing studies." "In fact what we did was list high hazard areas right on the maps so when folks see those and go out to purchase a home from someone else and come into our Planning Department, they'll know that they'll be buying a piece of property" "that's in a high hazard area." "Now we tried to put language in the deeds that when the property was sold and was refinanced through lending institutions that they were in a high hazard area." "But the property owners were violently opposed to it as well as the financial institutions and it didn't pass." "In fact, we had talked about a program to buy the properties back and the folks were violently opposed to that as well." "It's the place they want to stay, it's the place they want to retire and they don't want anybody telling them what to do." "They know they're in a hazardous zone but they've come to accept it." "This summer I started in July and I've now built this deck and I'm working on this building which..." "I'm building as I think of it." "I'm not I don't have an exact plan but it," "I know what I want." "I want a hot tub right here." "I want to be able to see that avalanche come and get me." "And I guess it's sort of a King Lear thing, uh blow ye winds and rage ye hurricaneos." "I like the weather." "I love the weather." "It's everywhere." "Apparently the risk of dying in an avalanche is less than that from choking on meat and I'm not a vegetarian so you know, it's just... whatever you do, wherever you live," "I mean, people live in flood plains, people live in mud zones, people live in hurr..." "I went to school is Sarasota Florida where we waited for hurricanes on a regular basis." "You know, there's no place on earth, I don't think, that is completely hazard free." "My friends they make jokes about it." "They call this Fort Liston." "And I get a charge out of it, I think it's pretty funny." "And they say, well we know you're going to be seeing the avalanches coming down and I say... ." "Bring it on!" "In 1972, a powder blast rocketed straight into the center of Juneau." "Luckily by the time it hit town, it's energy had already dissipated." "Many residents thought it was simply a fast and furious local blizzard." "A look up should have been enough for all to see the truth." "Experts say that it's not a question of "if"" "but "when" the next disaster will happen." "While some choose to live in danger zones others must earn a living there." "One of the most incredible survival stories took place at the Bessie G mine high in the La Plata mountains of Colorado." "In November 1986, Lester Morlang was working frantically to build a snow shed with his partner, mentor and best friend Jack Ritter." "We knew this storm was coming and we had to get this timber in place before the storm came." "That was the whole purpose was to keep that old east portal open for our ventilation inside." "Because of winter weather, the Bessie G had only been worked three months a year." "But Jack Ritter, who knew more about gold mining than just about anyone, had figured out how to operate her year round." "Yet this was the worst weather Jack had seen in over a decade." "Two feet of snow had already fallen and both men were in a race with the storm." "Lester was in the bucket of the skip loader and Jack was handing him timbers when everything suddenly turned white." "When it initially hit when I come out of the bucket." "I'm sure that was only a matter of seconds before I landed." "And just naturally you put your hands in front of your face in kind of ball up because you don't know what's happening to you." "But for the first few seconds, my whole life's flashing in front of my eyes." "And I'm seeing things I could never remember normally." "I'm actually seeing things like my son graduating from college and you know I was sure I was going to die right there." "Although the snow was packed loosely around him," "Lester Morlang's odyssey had just begun" "When I come to of course I had my hands in front of my face and everything was packed." "One of the first things I could do was get the snow away from my face because you go to inhale and you were just inhaling a mouthful of snow." "And then of course, I was screaming for Jack, you know, I just, screaming and crying and everything at the same time." "I mean it's trying to take your mind over." "Jack was already dead." "And now... buried only a few feet from Lester, the skip loader's diesel engine was spewing deadly exhaust into the snow." "I could feel the vibration in the snow and I could hear it, definitely hear it and I knew to keep away from it because I knew it would have been a big pocket of gas." "For if I'd a dug into that loader why that would have been it." "Lester knew where not to dig." "But which way was up?" "And when I had my face free I was kind of overlaying over on my side." "I had moisture from my mouth and I could feel it running across the corner of my eye." "So I knew I was laying kinda of on my side, head down, so I knew I wanted to start the incline you know to get back up." "What Lester couldn't know was that he would have to dig through almost 30 feet of snow fighting cold, claustrophobia and a fear so intense, it sickened him." "Several times I would go into convulsions and I did throw up." "It seemed like every half hour, why you'd have the dry heaves and some convulsions kind of like attacking you." "I wasn't thirsty at first" "I knew not to try and eat the snow but my mouth was drying out and everything and I'd take a little bit of snow in my mouth, just to wet my lips, and spit it back out." "Every second." "Every hour." "Every minute there's something there wanting you to lose control of your senses." "And you know I'm thinking about my family and the position I'd be leaving them in and a couple of times I almost thought my wife was right there with me because I could smell her perfume, it was just as distinct as..." "I know it was there." "I could smell her and it and that was good because that kind of gave me some strength to know that I was, somebody was thinking about me." "Many people were thinking about him." "Word of the missing miners reached Sheriff Bill Gardner." "As soon as I heard I knew that this was the real thing." "I can't describe the feeling." "It..." "My heart sunk." "My stomach turned and literally chills went up my spine because I knew what we were up against" "This was a significant winter storm." "We had snow of at least two inches an hour." "We knew that we had winds of in excess of 50 miles an hour." "And we knew that the site was totally isolated." "That the only way to the site was either by air, or through a canyon that was literally avalanche alley." "Avalanche safety expert Chris George was brought in to bomb the area, clearing it of potential avalanches, making it safe for the rescue team." "The road into the Bessie G up the La Plata canyon was already a serious hazard I mean just driving that road." "Just because one avalanche runs doesn't mean to say that everything else is secured." "You know you'll have one or two people trapped somewhere." "You send another 40 people in there." "It's not secure." "It's something we have to do." "After almost 22 hours of digging," "Lester finally inched closer to freedom" "I could tell I was seeing a little bit of light and so I was about, maybe two feet under and of course the adrenaline started pumping then and I just started digging and beating and jumping and I can remember just breaking out and just screaming" "Thank God, you know, I just, I made it." "I can't believe, I made it... and then, to get out in a freezing storm, snowing, blowing, that's when I got cold." "Bitterly disappointed with no rescue in sight," "Lester was forced to return to his snow tunnel for warmth." "He attempted to settle in for the night." "I tried to go to sleep and wake up real quick and think I was in bed and had a bad dream." "But a very sad thing when I did wake up," "I was still in the cave." "Then another avalanche hit, burying Lester for a second time." "To hear that crack and that sliding sound and I just assumed it was gonna squash me like a bug in my little hole there." "Luckily it just slid over the top." "Morning came I knew I'm gonna get started as early as I can." "I'm gonna dig my out again." "So it was about six." "I started digging my way out." "Course I only had a couple three feet of snow to go through." "and I got out." "I just started... the only direction I could move was down." "Finally in mid morning the winds abated enough." "We sent in Chris George to do our first aerial surveillance of the accident site." "And we flew by the east portal looking for tracks." "There was no indication of where that portal was, it was just one smooth angle of snow." "I had absolutely no idea that Lester had gotten out and was at the foot of the mountain which is quite a desperate descent under any circumstances." "I'll never forget that helicopter flying approximately the same elevation that I was, but they were looking," "I could look in and see them and they were looking up at the avalanche, of course, they didn't expect me, where I was and then, yeah it made me mad, I was, I was mad." "They just flew past me." "I could almost I thought I felt prop wash they were so close." "This must have been a half hour later." "I heard the thunder or what I thought was thunder and then I realized they were dropping bombs on the slope to secure the slope for the rescuers." "So I knew I had to get out of there." "I finally got up and got behind a tree and it wasn't 15 minutes, I could hear the roar." "It was louder than any thunder you've ever heard." "If the first two didn't get him, the third avalanche certainly wouldn't" "Lester was almost to Junction Creek when he heard the sound of the helicopter overhead." "This time they saw him." "He was flown 10 minutes away to Mercy Medical Center where he was treated for severe frostbite." "They wanted to cut off several fingers but Lester held on." "With physical therapy and personal strength, his fingers remain." "I can't express the mixture of joy and wonder that someone survived this." "I mean veteran mountaineers and search and rescue people were looking at each other." "People were hugging each other." "And we were going we can't believe this is true." "I have read hundreds of reports of avalanches." "I've been teaching snow safety for 35 years." "I've been in mountains, you know for 40 odd years." "To me it's one of the greatest survival stories I've ever heard of." "It's good for me because it gave me a new outlook and I," "I'm a lot tougher than I was and I appreciate things a lot more than I did." "Like a nice warm house and a loving family." "I'm rich, I didn't need to extract all the gold out of this mine to get rich." "I know now what rich is and I'm rich." "Experience teaches when we pay attention." "Wisdom arrives after we learn." "Winter will always come." "Snow will always fall." "All things obey the law of gravity." "In the mountains, ignorance and arrogance can place us in harm's way." "We have a choice." "But if we remain unaware and the mountains continue to lure us, the white death will strike again..." "and again." "You're dealing with one of the fundamental forces of nature here, but unlike a hurricane or even a landslide or a flood or somethin', you can't see it." "It's lying there in wait all the time twenty-four hours a day." "You might just be walking along minding your own business and once it's got you, it's going to hurt you." "It conforms to every single nook and cranny of your body." "You literally cannot pull yourself out even if you're just up to your ankles." "People have always been just terrified of the idea of quicksand." "Its that awful feeling that somehow the ground which you know is solid and you walk on is somehow not there, and you're going to take a step, and you're going to disappear." "Since the earliest days of the cinema it was one of Hollywood's favorite ways to dispose of the bad guy." "Or trap an innocent victim." "Producers created bottomless pits of quicksand out of peat moss, oatmeal, even wine corks" "And helped make the soggy stuff legendary." "But quicksand is more than just a clever plot device." "It's real..." "It's dangerous..." "And it's more common than most people believe." "Quicksand is found along coastlines, on riverbanks, even in our own backyards." "Though one of nature's deadliest traps, quicksand is made of just two basic ingredients... sand and water... its a simple recipe-for disaster." "In 1997, twelve year old Sara Cody and a friend went for a stroll on what looked like a perfectly ordinary beach, on the northwest coast of England." "We were staying at my Auntie Jackie's holiday flat for the weekend, me and my friend Georgina." "We went out on the sand we have been out before and there is actually signs saying quicksands and it was a stupid thing to do, but you don't really think about that at the time." "You think, "Oh, I'm not gonna sink"" "It felt quite muddy at first and it did feel like my feet were gettin' a bit stuck, but it just felt like walking in thick mud." "And then it got kind of more..." "liquidy." "And as I walked along, it was all of a sudden like a big pocket of quicksand I stood into." "It felt like it was sucking me, pulling me down into the sand" "I tried to pull myself out, but that made me sink about twice as fast." "And there was people shouting from the prom," ""Stop struggling and just keep still."" "I sunk up to about here-ish, I think." "And, ahm, I remember at first my feet didn't feel like I had them anymore." "There was lots of sand in my wellies and they were being dragged down." "It was liquid, but it was going really hard where I was puttin' pressure onto the sand." "It was just settin' ike concrete around me." "Sara was mired deep in quicksand, only 150 feet from the shore." "It looked just like the rest of the beach, but this particular patch of sand was different." "Sara was locked so firmly in place" "She couldn't get out on her own." "What we think of as solid ground" " Terra firma... - isn't really solid at all." "It's billions of separate granular particles resting on each other." "Normally that's all it is." "But quicksand forms when rising water levels in the ground force the grains to lose contact, and they float apart, suspended in water." "The liquefied sand can no longer support you, so down you go." "As Sara realized too late, struggling is a bad idea as it only liquefies the ground even more so you sink further." "Trying to pull your legs up compacts the sand tightly, turning the water pressure into suction, and locking your foot in place." "The finer the particles in the quicksand, the tighter and more vise-like the grip." "Word of Sara's predicament reached the armside coast guard who handle some 30 qs rescue every year." "When I arrived on the promenade I saw Gordon, one of my crew, already in there with Sarah." "She really was in a mess." "She was really frightened, she was screaming crying, she was just thrashing, all she wanted to do was get out." "So I radioed, but still we are just talking minutes." "After a while, there were all these people around me." "It was getting really panicky." "There's lots of noise and fire engines and police and it seemed like it was taking forever." "Freeing a victim from quicksand without also getting trapped calls for special gear." "The Arnside coast guard uses portable planks to cross the unstable sands and support their weight during the rescue." "They put a big wooden board over my head." "It was like a big square with a hollow in the middle." "And to pull me out, they pulled one leg out first." "They basically dug my leg out with their arms they put the one leg onto the board so I could lever my other leg out." "And then I was sort of laying in the sand and then they managed to get me out altogether." "And they just picked me up° ° ° just ran me across these boards to the shore and I didn't touch the floor until I got to the ambulance." "Since it happened I've been back once." "I came a bit onto the sands, but I stayed mostly by the rocks because I think I've learned my lesson the first time..." "It's not worth the hassle of all the peoples jobs coming out and helping you and really it's pointless going out there in the first place." "In this part of England quicksand isn't limited to the beach where Sara was trapped." "The town of Arnside lies near the entrance to an enormous body of water called Morecambe bay." "The area is well known for its wildlife and scenic beauty." "It is also notorious for some of the world's most dangerous quicksand." "Sands do look nice, don't they?" "And they look safe." "They always look safe to the lay person it looks like any old sand." "And that's its hidden danger." "For centuries, Morecambe bay at low tide has seduced unwary travellers, tempting them to risk their lives for a short cut from one village to another by crossing the sands." "More than 150 people are known to have perished attempting this journey." "By itself, quicksand is not deadly but it is the ultimate trap," "locking its victim in place while some other force of nature finishes the job." "In Morecambe bay, it's a 30-foot tide." "You can never out-run it really, because it never tires, the tide." "There is a saying in this area that it can travel at the speed of a galloping horse." "Well, even a horse can get tired, but the tide never does." "To help travellers more safely negotiate" "Morecambe bay's massive tides and infamous quicksand, the British monarchy appointed the first official guide some 600 years ago." "In 1963, Cedric Robinson became the latest in this long line of queen's guides to the sands." "You can only know and read the sands from bein' brought up such as I was, from a very early age." "There's no way you can read a book and say, "Well, I know the route."" "It doesn't work like that." "You have to know the sands intimately and if it can catch you out out there, it will do." "Cedric has lived and worked as a fisherman on Morecambe bay for over 50 years and he knows its perils better than most." "His introduction to quicksand began at the age of fourteen." "I didn't want to do anything, only follow the sands for a livin', same as me father and me grandfather, and even me grandmother." "She was a fisherwoman." "Here on Morecambe bay, fishing has always been a hazardous profession." "At low tide, the bay is transformed into a wet desert... - the fish more than seven miles off shore." "In the old days," "Iocals harvested the sea from horse and cart, venturing out on the treacherous sands to set their nets and wait for the catch to roll in with the tide." "Not everyone made it back to safe ground." "Many foundered in quicksand, both horse and driver drowned by the returning tide as it surged over their heads." "As the royal guide, one of Cedric's responsibilities is to educate the public to Morecambe bay's risks by leading "nature walks" out on the sands." "Before taking any group off shore, he surveys the exposed flats." "Come a fine day, before setting foot on the sands," "I can go up onto the tops, with a marvelous view of the estuary, and I can look through the binoculars out there and scan the river down and I can say to myself with my knowledge:" ""Well, that's the place to cross."" "The danger spots are the lowest areas, where the meandering paths of rivers and streams carve narrow channels in the bay... quicksand is formed by the action of the tides as it raises the water table beneath the bay," "saturating and loosening the sand in and along these channels." "It looks just the same as any sand." "It looks firm until you stand on it and it just goes like jelly." "And the more people that goes over that area, the more jellyish it gets." "There are some areas out there where it would be too frightening to go near them." "But there are areas where you can go on it and you can have fun with children." "It may seem unwise to mix kids and quicksand, but Cedric's hope is to prevent future tragedies by teaching children how to recognize it for themselves." "Have you ever been on quicksands before?" "No." "You could get really stuck couldn't you?" "Yeah..." "Yeah that's it." "It clings, doesn't it?" "It's like a suction, isn't it?" "So it's bad there." "And once you go on it, it's worse." "But if you come back to there, that area in two hours, that water will have come out and it'll have hardened up a little bit." "And that's the danger." "If you were in there for two hours, we wouldn't get you out because the water comes out and it sets just like concrete." "Quicksand is always the highlight of the walk, but Cedric makes sure the kids understand that ultimately, it's a serious hazard." "After a certain time one or two of them will get that little bit deeper and... - and then it gets past the exciting stage and someone can get stuck." "So Cedric has to blow the whistle, say, "Come on out of there!" "I don't want to lose any of ya'."" "Remember girls, not too deep otherwise you'll have to stay!" "Usually, you find quicksand outside, a product of mother nature." "But with the right ingredients and know-how, you can make your own." "Scott Steedman understands quicksand better than most." "He is a civil engineer who has spent his professional life studying the earth beneath our feet." "At home in the kitchen," "Scott has his own special recipe for quicksand." "This is corn flour which people use for thickening gravy and it shows just all the same properties as quicksand." "Quite extraordinary when you mix it with water you can change it from this solid form, into a liquid and back again." "And uh, let me just show you that because I'll just put some more in, more than I need and we'll see if we can't make a quicksand here in the kitchen." "The cornflower is a hard and fine granular material, so its a bit like sand or fine sand but extremely fine and so we can see in the mixture all the same properties that you see in a quicksand on a beach." "But really in a small scale, here in a glass." "So this is the corn flour paste in its liquid form." "And if I just stir the spoon slowly you can see that it is a liquid." "Lift it up and it drips straight back in just like a liquid." "But if I stab at it with a spoon quickly like a person trying to run across the quicksand they don't sink in." "It is absolutely solid... - well it's undulating, but it's solid under the tip of the spoon." "It's got all that strength to hold the person up." "But if the person stands still, it just sinks in." "And then if I grab at the spoon and try and pull it out quickly, like I'm kicking with my legs in the quicksand, it locks absolutely solid." "If I kick from side to side" "I just can't get it out - it's absolutely stuck." "In the movies, getting stuck in quicksand was usually a terrifying experience, and the hapless victim went to extraordinary lengths to escape." "But in reality there are some people around who just can't wait to get into it." "These days my experience with it is filming other people." "People from all walks of life." "They bring their selves or their significant other and they want to jump into a bottomless pit of quicksand to experience it, and I provide that." "Chuck Lang is making his own contribution to the b-movie genre." "Be looking over your shoulder as you're running like you hear the posse coming." "You want me to stand back here and fire a few shots over your head or something?" "Chuck is in high demand for his directing skills, and for his knack for finding quicksand, along the banks of the Mississippi river." "Chuck and his friends are just a few members of an emerging network of quicksand fanatics." "The competition is who can find quicksand first." "And the game is what do you do after you've found it..." "It is almost like you are chained to the ground all over." "You have to move, you have to exercise a lot of energy just to move a little bit." "Imagine yourself in molasses." "It's almost like an exercise." "You are going to burn some calories." "You really are." "To an outsider, playing around with a dangerous natural phenomenon may seem foolish." "But after years of trial and error, these buffs have developed an impressive understanding of quicksand" " Its realities and a few myths... including the ones Hollywood made up." "Don't believe what you saw on TV." "You're not going to sink out of sight." "Perhaps its the biggest myth of all:" "that you'll step into a pool of quicksand..." "And disappear." "But that's virtually impossible." "You're actually more at risk in a pool of plain old water." "Because humans are composed mainly of water, we won't stop sinking until we've displaced an amount equal to our own volume, and that puts us beneath the surface." "Quicksand is twice as dense as water, so we won't sink nearly as far, only about chest deep." "The quicksanders have a good time applying their knowledge of buoyancy, but generally they don't tempt fate." "Here on the Mississippi the quicksand they play in is not the most dangerous..." "The sand grains are fairly large so the grip is less "vice-like."" "But just in case something does go wrong, they use the buddy system." "It's not a good idea to ever go out by yourself to look for quicksand." "Because if you find it and you do get stuck you could be there a while." "Bruce Fyfe certainly wasn't out looking for quicksand when he stumbled into it one night in 1999 while chasing his dog." "But find it he did, in a very unlikely place." "Basically, it's dusk, fourth of July weekend, Friday and I'm booking' down nine mile comin' back with the dog and got approximately a little past where the gravel pit is, and she bolts out the back of the truck" "and I stopped the truck, took off through the sandpiles after her." "And she goes down the hill and got out where they dump all their sand trappings and stuff after they clean the rocks and gravel off and it's real soft there in spots and I happened to find a soft spot." "Ended up goin' in and basically a couple hours later realized I was not gettin' out without any help." "Bruce found himself knee deep in a peculiar kind of quicksand an unexpected by-product of the gravel industry." "Water and fine sand particles from the mounds of crushed rock make this quicksand especially "concrete-like"" "and difficult to escape." "Bruce was locked in and looking at an extended stay." "As my feet went into it and got locked you could actually feel it encasing my feet and part of my leg." "From probably mid point from my shins down to the bottoms of my feet" "I couldn't feel anything." "You know it was just° ° ° they were dead." "And I wasn't going forward, backwards, up or down, and I was stuck." "I think I resigned myself to the fact that I was probably going to be there overnight, 'cause I ° ° ° you know, very little traffic, everybody's gone..." "I could hear the expressway traffic, but that's a couple miles away and just well," "I'll wait 'til morning and just start all over again." "And, it just got progressively hotter through the weekend and by the third day" "I did drink the water that was around me." "I was just to that point where I knew something was happening to me physically, because I couldn't focus on anything." "Bruce was suffering from more than just dehydration and prolonged exposure." "At this point, he'd been trapped for three days and four nights... more than 60 hours, and was dealing with a frightening effect of quicksand:" "a crushing pressure on his limbs." "Moving his legs back and forth had compacted the quicksand." "The pressure had increased until it actually cut off the blood supply to his legs." "Eventually, Bruce lost all feeling in his lower extremeties as the cells, nerves and tissues were starved of essential oxygen and nutrients supplied by blood flow." "When the quicksand stuff the material it was just like if you were squeezing on your legs hard as this but it went from his mid-thighs all the way down his leg, just a total squeeze down to around his foot" "and kind of just squished it right up..." "I guess you could make the comparison to being in a vise-like situation..." "Believe me coming on to the third morning" "I wanted out." "I wanted to go home." "Bruce's endurancetest finally came to an end when the sun rose on Tuesday morning." "I heard the machinery start and I started screaming, and some guy popped up over the bank and he says," ""How long have you been here?"" "And I told him and I said roll the rescue squad and get me some water." "They tried digging with some shovels." "They really couldn't because we were worried about some injuries to his legs." "They dug with some screwdrivers a couple of inches at a time running their hands down his legs to make sure they were not poking into them." "Because he couldn't feel his legs, from the knees down to around his feet." "He had no feeling in there from being compacted for so long." "As soon as my feet came free they just pirouetted me up and got me down on the backboard and got me out of there. ." "I was tired, I was hot, and I was just trying to stay with it." "I didn't realize I had developed an infection, my kidneys had started to shut down, and there was a lot of weird things wrong inside of me that I really couldn't tell." "The big thing I knew was that my feet were messed up." "Bruce's kidneys were treated and soon back to normal, but his feet were another matter." "When tissues are starved of blood and oxygen long enough, they die, which can lead to gangrene." "In the worst cases toes or even legs are amputated." "Sometimes if I move my foot just right I get a real bad twinge and that could still be just scar tissue breaking apart." "The Doctor said it could be a year before your feet get back to normal." "Time could have been Bruce's real enemy but luckily, his rescuers reached him before permanent injury set in." "In a swamp north of Toronto, it was the combination of quicksand and cold Canadian weather that spelled disaster for nine year old Ethan Beattie." "The nightmare began one chilly spring afternoon when Ethan and his friend Steven took a wrong turn while playing in the backwoods near their homes." "I got stuck at one point and Steven thought that me and Elmo were behind him, so he went on." "And then we were separated." "We were looking for this path that would take us back but we ended up in the swamp." "As they searched for a way home, the ground beneath their feet began to give way." "Well, it looked like it was solid, but when you stepped, you would start to sink, and it looks like it's shallow but when you step in your leg ° ° ° it will get deeper." "Steven managed to find his way home and told his mother that Ethan and Elmo were still lost in the swamp." "As darkness fell, police and local rescue squads organized an extensive search." "You could see the lights of the fire trucks and the police cars." "There was lots of commotion and you could see people massing down at the corner here, waiting to go in on foot to do a search." "The rescuers had their work cut out for them." "Ethan had disappeared in the heart of a three square mile swamp and it was already dusk when the search began." "We'd also been informed by the police officers that had gone out ahead of time that there was quicksand." "So there's a danger out there that we were actually told not to actually leave the boat unless we had a visual contact with the boy." "You hope for the best, but you expect the worst, you don't want to go up there all pumped thinking you're going to find somebody alive, because if you don't, especially a child." "If you don't find them alive that's devastating." "For several hours the rescue team scoured the swamp but there were no signs of Ethan or the dog" "I can't imagine what a little nine year-old boy is thinking, when it starts to get dark, he can see the helicopter, he can hear the people looking for him." "Ahm, he can't answer because it's starting to get too cold." "He's gotten too far." "He can't get back." "He's getting stuck." "The only thing he's got with him is his dog." "As the night wore on," "Ethan's situation grew more desperate." "Stuck in quicksand, his body trapped in near-freezing swamp water, he was in real danger of dying from exposure." "Elmo the dog sensed Ethan was in trouble, and stayed close to the boy." "When I got too cold." "Elmo would lie on me and when I was falling asleep, Elmo would lick my face so I would stay awake." "Every 15-20 seconds we would call out his name, hoping that we'd get a response." "More than five hours after the search began, the beam of Dave Pierce's spotlight reflected off the eyes of an animal crouched in the reeds." "We got probably within about 50 feet and I was able to see a slightly black shape and then we knew it was a dog." "When we came upon the boy and Dale shouted out" ""He's alive!" boy, that was it." "The adrenaline's pumpin' and we're basically running across there to get to him." "And to find him still alive;" "still alert° ° °" "OK, now we've got a chance." "By now, Ethan was ice cold and extremely weak, sunk deep in the quicksand." "I was up to here in mud and it was, they would... " "I think they were pullin' me a lot to get me out." "But the soft wet ground nearly thwarted the rescuers' efforts to free Ethan and get him into the boat." "Dale picked him up." "He turned around, he took one step and boom he went down to his chest in quicksand." "It scared the hell out of us." "We knew it was there, but we didn't step in it before" "The men formed an assembly line, handing Ethan off to each other as they wrestled with the quicksand." "They struggled for solid footing and slowly maneuvered back to their craft." "It was close to eleven o'clock when the rescue team finally carried Ethan to shore." "After seven hours in the cold swamp he was in a state of severe shock, and deeply hypothermic." "His body temperature had fallen to 86.9 degrees Fahrenheit... - within just a few degrees of cardiac failure." "Had Ethan been in the quicksand much longer, he may not have survived." "Wandering into swamps and getting stuck in quicksand is one thing." "But Lil Judd certainly never expected to find it in her part of the world." "You've heard about quicksand." "You hear about it, but... but I'd be able to locate it basically in my back yard, no." "No, that, I didn't expect." "Though Hollywood has produced some pretty good fakes over the years," "California seems an unlikely candidate for real quicksand." "Of the two main ingredients, there's more than enough sand, but this dry state can be short on water." "But in 1998 heavy rains had turned a normally dry gully just east of Hollywood into a quicksand trap." "We rode out on the sandbank and we were standing out there for maybe five minutes." "And he decided to take a step forward and it had a drop." "Suddenly all of him was in and I looked around and realized he had actually literally sunk, because as I'm trying to tell him "Get up,"" "he's trying to get up, but he can't." "For a moment there, I just went panicky and I sat down next to him and started crying." "The thing with horses and animals in general when they're in a panic situation like this, they will either give up or very possibly they'll go insane." "So all I could do was hope he understood from my tone of voice." "I gotta go." "I gotta leave you." "I can't get you out on my own." "I have to get help." "I'll be back." "Don't move." "Lay as still as you can."" "Now Lil had to avoid getting herself trapped in the same quicksand that held her horse." "I ran across this area and kept sinking down to my hip." "I just grabbed at whatever I could and pushed against whatever I could and just never allowed myself to remain too long in the same place." "Help was not long in coming, but once the rescue efforts had begun, destined's situation quickly went from bad to worse." "He ends up in the stream." "And all I could think was "oh my god," "With all these people here, he's gonna drown." "I am going to watch him drown." "With a lot of encouragement, destined was able to thrash his way out of the water, but the weight of his 1600 pound body, concentrated on four narrow hooves, made it impossible for the horse to get out of the quicksand." "As a last resort, a helicopter was brought in to airlift him to solid ground." "Somehow they managed to get this harness on him and they started lifting him." "He is flying up in the air." "And he's slipping out of the harness." "And I'm saying, "Put him down." "Put him down."" "But the first place destined landed wasn't solid enough to support his weight." "He continued to flounder in the quicksand until his rescuers adjusted his harness and tried a second airlift." "No one ever said," ""You know, we can't save this horse."" "No one ever said that to me." "And I'm sure a lot of people were thinking it when they saw what he looked like and where he was." "This time, the helicopter pilots gently lowered destined onto firm ground." "Despite four hours in quicksand and two precarious airlifts, the horse was unharmed." "He was up and walking again in just minutes." "I am one very, very lucky horse owner!" "And he's one very, very lucky horse." "Lil and destined were fortunate." "There were enough people, expertise and technology to save the day." "But that hasn't always been the case." "In the 19th century, there were few resources available to American cowboys." "While driving their herds of cattle, they encountered quicksand on a regular basis as they tried to ford sand-laden rivers." "Hauling a two-ton steer out of quicksand was no easy matter." "The best they could do was try and pull the animals free with ropes." "But unfortunately, things didn't always go like clockwork." "As one weary cowboy put it," ""this last method saved many bogged down cattle, but it tore the heads, horns or legs off quite a few others."" "The cattle of the old west were lost in small patches of quicksand." "But sometimes quicksand can spread for miles... and swallow a city." "Perhaps the most remarkable case occurred in 1692." "The city of Port Royal, Jamaica - at the time, one of the wealthiest cities in the new world... - was resting quietly on its foundation... - a sandy spit of land 16 kilometers long." "Just before noon on June 7 th, a huge earthquake shook the ground with tremendous force." "The violent motion pushed seawater up through the loose sand." "In a process called liquefaction, the entire peninsula beneath Port Royal turned to quicksand." "When the shaking finally stopped after ten minutes, a third of the city had slid into the sea, and 2000 people were dead." "The water had drained back out of the ground," "locking people into graves of hardened quicksand." "Written accounts from survivors describe some of the most horrifying moments." ""No place suffered like Port Royal where whole streets were swallowed up by the opening earth and houses and inhabitants went down together..." "Some were swallowed up to the Neck, and then the Earth shut upon them, and squeezed them to death... some were left buried with their heads above ground." ""The shake opened the earth;" "the seawaters flew way up and carried the people in alive." "I lost my husband, my son and all I ever had in the world"" "Port royal went down more than 300 years ago, but despite the hazard, we still build cities on low-lying, sandy areas near rivers or the sea." "The phenomenon of liquefaction is of vital concern to engineers who must factor in the risk of quicksand conditions whenever they plan new construction in earthquake zones." "At the university of Bristol in England," "Scott Steedman uses models to demonstrate how buildings will react when the ground beneath turns to quicksand, as it did in port royal." "We're building a beach here to demonstrate some of the properties of quicksand." "It's a special sort of quicksand, because it's a quicksand that's formed in an earthquake." "The shaking in an earthquake creates extra water pressure in the ground and that boils up to the surface and produces all the same phenomena as quicksand." "This is the ocean down here, and stretching up the slope here is the beach and behind the beach here is the flat ground, behind where you may have a town or people..." "This is quite a high building next to a rather steep slope." "On a shaking table," "Scott subjects his model high rise to simulated earthquakes of seven or eight on the Richter scale... - magnitudes easily strong enough to liquefy the earth, and turn it to quicksand." "You can see how the building has sunk in and rotated here, mainly because the slope has given way beneath it." "And so that's forced it to tilt over this direction." "As the shaking progressed, the water pressure's built up in the sand underneath the foundation of the bottom block, and as that happened the ground got softer." "And with the shaking and the frequency of the earthquake, it started to get more and more dramatic and in the end, of course, with the lean becoming more and more pronounced, eventually the top blocks just rolled off and fell down the hill." "Just east of anchorage, Alaska is Turnagain arm, a 50 mile long fjord filled with quicksand." "Over the eons, the slow movement of glaciers has ground hard rock from the mountains around the arm into an extremely fine powder." "Meltwater carries that powder downstream and into the waters of Turnagain arm." "When the tide retreats, a vast expanse of glacial silt is exposed." "In Alaska, they call this the mud flats." "But when these tiny particles mix with subsurface water from the incoming tide, this powdered rock has all the properties of deadly quicksand." "More than a million people visit Alaska every year." "Many of them come to enjoy the waters of Turnagain arm." "Most have no idea they are in serious danger of getting stuck." "The Lukens family has lived beside Turnagain arm for thirty years, but despite knowing about the quicksand, they've turned the fjord at low tide into a playground." "We've never had any trouble getting out of the mud." "Of course, you know, we don't sit there and see how deeply we can get ourselves imbedded either." "We try and get out right away and move. ." "As long as you keep moving you really don't get stuck." "So far the Lukens have been lucky." "But that's not always the case." "Most people are tourists, and they go out there and they think it is a relatively safe area" "They play around with it" "They know the stuck of this kind of lake jelow and they stay with it and then they play with it." "and then they get one ankle stuck and they try to pull that out." "They get the second ankle stuck and pretty soon they're they're in up over their knees." "As usual, quicksand is just the trap." "In Turnagain arm, the real killers are the cold water, and the enormous tide, the second highest in the world." "It is swift and extreme, rising forty feet in less than six hours." "Rescuing people from quicksand is tough enough." "Trying to beat a racing tide ups the stakes dramatically." "Four times a year, the Girdwood fire department runs a thorough simulation to check their gear, and make sure every member of the team is ready for a real life quicksand rescue." "Dan sill is the operations commander." "When we show up on scene we are going to go out, we are going to evaluate the situation, evaluate the mud and the currents and the tides and the winds and everything else." "We'll make a game plan." "We'll either set up a person here or here." "Everything we do out there, we've trained for it numerous times." "Everybody knows what the game plan is, including the victim." "We'll take Bob out there and put him the mud no more than his knees." "There are plenty of suitable areas in Turnagain arm to stage a drill." "Some of the worst quicksand is just off the highway." "This silty peninsula thirty-five miles east of Anchorage is perfect for testing the Girdwood team's rescue skills." "It has all the hazards they face on real calls, including the debilitating element of cold." "This mud is the same temperature water is... - about 45 degrees, which is really, really cold." "And if you're out here without the proper protective equipment on, you're gonna get hypothermic when you struggle to get out of it." "You're gonna get cold." "You're gonna get exhausted, and you're going to take and go down and die real quick." "Having the right clothes can make the difference between a successful rescue and a fatality." "Full dry suits, life jackets, and helmets protect the men and increase the amount of time they can spend working to free a victim from cold quicksand." "Mike Tumey has been with the department for more than a decade." "He knows all too well the pressure of trying to rescue someone trapped and in desperate circumstances." "In 1988, he witnessed one of the saddest quicksand tragedies in recent Alaskan history." "Mr. And Mrs. Dickison were newlyweds and, ah, they had a little more gumption than most of us and had chose to spend their honeymoon, ah, gold mining up in Seattle Creek, which is just around the corner here." "To get there in their four-wheeler, they had to travel across the mud flats." "Jay and Adeana Dickison headed out early in the morning to catch the low tide..." "Just three hundred yards off shore, their four wheeler bogged down in the silt." "Adeana jumped off to push from behind." "But struggling with the atv liquified the ground beneath her feet and she sank up to her knees." "When she stopped moving the quicksand closed around her legs with an iron grip." "Her husband labored frantically, but after three hours he had only managed to free one of Adeana's legs." "By the time jay ran for help, the tide was pouring into Turnagain arm." "About nine o'clock in the morning we got a call for a, ah, possible victim stuck in the mud." "We responded from the station." "It's about a half-hour response time to this location, hiked on the trail with all of our equipment" "As I reached the shoreline," "I heard the screams of a young woman crying for help" ""Please don't let me drown." "Please save me."" "There was a, ah, woman trapped in the rising waters with the water just below her chin." "I went below the surface to try and feel what was taking place there," "I felt her leg and it seemed to disappear in the sand and I thought, "She's buried all the way up to her knees,"" "you know, probably straight down." "And at that point I tried to tug on her leg," "But when I came up, I saw her gasping for breath." "So every time I tugged her, I pulled her under." "Each time it's violent." "I'm pulling with even more strength now, but each time it's jerking her under the water and thrashing her at the same time." "I go under again to try and free her leg and when I come back up she's under the water now." "The tide's gone over her hand and everything was in a..." "small circle." "All I could see was this little area here in front of me, but I'm looking down into her face and she's under the water holding her breath." "And I'm thinking, you know," ""What a desperate situation this is." "What a... you know, this brave woman she, despite all the odds, she's gonna..." "she's gonna stick with us." "She's gonna fight with us all the way to the end."" "Anyway, I didn't know what to do." "She's underwater now and she's holding her breath and, I can't thrash her now because she's got one breath left." "At that point, ah, her husband took a... a tube off their suction dredge and they stuck it in her mouth." "And, I..." "I stroked her forehead and said," ""Just keep breathing,"" "and I went down again to try and free her leg and I just pulled as hard as I possibly could and I just sat there." ""We've got to get her out," you know, pulling as hard as I possibly can and, ah, I couldn't free her." "While mike struggled beneath the surface, the tide continued to rise." "When he finally came up for air, Adeana Dickison had drowned." "It wasn't until low tide later that afternoon the, ah, rescuers that went back to recover her, ah, found her, ah, still where we'd left her, ah, still trapped just from the knee down by one leg in the mud" "and at an angle like this." "The tide had come in swept over her, gone back out with all that force and that leg was still trapped, snared in that mud." "They had to dig her out with shovels." "The tragedy devastated the Girdwood team." "On that fateful day, they were beaten by the rising tide and a lack of time." "For more than eleven years they've continued searching for ways to perfect their techniques and speed up their operation." "I literally spent months and months dreaming and fantasizing about a tool that I could build that I could expedite the rescue." "And literally in minutes." "What Dan sill came up with turned the Girdwood team's greatest enemy into their most important ally." "Water became the key component in their fight against the clock." "For everything to work, the floating pump which capitalizes on the water around them must be kept running." "I just want you guys to make certain if something does happen and does go wrong that we are relying' on you." "So no matter what it takes, that pump is your responsibility." "You can not let it shut off." "I don't want to freak you out or anything, but once Bob's in the mud he's our responsibility." "So we're not gonna let him die." "OK, I'm up to my knees" "Feel like you're sinking anymore?" "A little." "I'm ready." "You ready?" "Ready." "Go ahead, fire it up!" "The float-a-pump sucks water up through the hose and into a long perforated metal tube." "High pressure blasts of water liquefy the dense quicksand and unlock the grip on Bob's legs." "With the new device, the extrication takes less than a minute." "After each run-through, the team gathers for a debriefing." "I could not move my legs I could feel it." "It felt like cement was around them." "And the more I tried... - before Scott was there, I was just playing around... - but the more I tried the further I was sinking." "The thing is, what typically these people do, and I was watchin' you do that, is, ah, they'll get one foot stuck, so they'll try to pull this one out." "This one goes deeper." "Then they realize that and they go," ""I'll stand on this foot,"" "and they'll try to pull that out." "Then that one goes deeper." "So they're caught in a see-saw motion where they're goin' back and forth and they're actually forcin' themselves to get deeper." "So once both feet are in what are you going to do if you can't get either one of them out?" "Concentrate on one foot." "Wiggle one foot to get one foot out." "That foot gets on the highest piece of ground that you can find." "Then you work on that one." "And vibration is what'll get it out." "What if both are in and you aren't getting them to move at all?" "You need to fall forward on your belly, get all your weight off° ° ° off° ° °" "Sometimes it's not possible because you're up to your knees." "What you have to do is get the weight off of one point and work to get one° ° ° one leg out or one foot out, roll 'til you can get the other one out, do a roll and run for high ground." "The bottom line is..." "is you shouldn't be out there." "It's..." " There's nothing..." "nothing for you out there." "It is just nothing but danger, and I've said it again and I've said it before." "It's you're flirting with the devil." "You're literally flirting with the devil." "Sadly, Dan and his colleagues, along with rescuers around the world, fight that devil all too often." "Quicksand by itself is not the killer, but locked in its relentless grip, any one of it's accomplices:" "time, tide, cold or heat can finish us off." "Again and again, we seem to ignore the warning signs and fall prey to one of the world's most insidious traps." "Quicksand can be found almost anywhere." "So the safest bet is to watch your step." "Our world is lit by two fires" "One above." "And one below." "Nothing can contain the inferno beneath our feet" "In the past thousand years, volcanoes have claimed more than 300,000 lives" "No beauty more deadly than the fire within." "The rocky heights of the Andes, in South America, are more than mere mountains." "Many are sleeping volcanoes." "In Colombia, a peak called Galeras has slumbered more than four decades." "Then in 1988, soldiers stationed at its summit reported small earthquakes, and the smell of sulfur." "Some six miles away, the city of Pasto is built on rich volcanic soil the pride of local farmers." "Galeras has never harmed Pasto." "But a large eruption could threaten up to 400,000 lives." "Colombian officials invited Standley Williams, of Arizona State University, to work with local volcanologist," "An expert of Latin American volcanoes" "William helped organize the international Galeras Workshop, in January 1993." "El volcan Galeras es el volcan historicamente mas activo en todo el Colombia..." "Close to a hundred volcanologist from fifteen nations attend." "After three days of meetings, they head for the summit." "Galeras has been stable for six months a reassuring sign to Williams and his colleagues." "We were volcanologist with a lot of experience." "We had been working for five years by that time on this volcano." "We thought we understood Galeras." "In fact, we thought Galeras was in a relatively calm time for an active volcano." "Most scientist join field trips on the outer slopes of the mountain." "Williams leads a group of twelve on a grueling, two hour hike to the inner crater." "As his colleagues explore the terrain, Williams keep watch." "Everybody opened up their cases and backpacks and collected samples of the gases of read the gravimeter." "Geoff Brown, professor from England, is the expert of the world on how use gravity in volcanoes." "The two Colombian scientists with him were really happy that they had a chance to work with family of volcanologist." "Igor was working that day with Nestor Garcia and Nestor's a Colombian, very good friend." "It was an exciting, positive field day." "Then all of a sudden, with no warning we began to hear a lot of noise." "I looked down into the crater and at Igor and Nestor and I yelled," "We better get outta here now." "I made it running, not very far, before, the first big rock knocked a big hole in my head, broke my jaw, ruined my ear." "Made it another 20 or 30 feet, I don't know, not very far, a lot of rocks hit me," "But the next big one broke my left leg shattered my right leg." "I tried to run, but my foot was standing" "It was hardly moved my legs" "I crawled." "The problem was, I was on fire, so I had to roll over and try to get the fire out." "So I crawled behind a big rock." "The eruption spares everyone on the outer slopes." "But members of Williams group appear at the summit with grim reports." "At least two scientists are dead." "The names of the missing are quickly tallied." "Andrew, Mike, yo, Standley, y Jose Arles." "Luis with help, and Andrew McFarlene with help can make it out." "With help." "Not by themselves." "We gotta send somebody down there." "Yeah." "Within 15 minutes, the eruption is over." "Now Williams struggles to remain conscious." "I had hours of time lying there with dead people very close and thought about going home and being with my wife and kids." "I didn't want to die, that's for sure..." "Less than three hours after the eruption, rescue teams arrive from Pasto." "Three hikers and six volcanologists are dead in a blast no one could foresee." "Several bodies will never be found." "Rescuers locate Williams when he cried out for help." "He's the last survivor lifted off the mountain." "In 48 hours, he'll be flown by Lear jet, to a hospital in Arizona." "Sixteen surgeries saved a mangled leg, and patched a hole in Williams' skull." "Skin grafts hide burns." "A hearing aid remedies a ruined ear." "Only his determination survives intact" "Galeras remains a threat to thousands who live in its shadow." "A danger undiminished by the tragedy of nine deaths." "The loss of friends and colleagues breaks the heart but strengthens the will." "I've worked on Galeras now for about eight years and I've tried hard to essentially get control of Galeras, and Galeras says, No, I can't be controlled." "Ha, I'm much bigger than you Mr. Williams." "And I come back and say," "No, I'm not going to let you do that' I'm going to come back, and uh, I'm going to get on top of Galeras." "I've been in the crat again." "We're sort of battling it out." "In the past five decades, nearly thirty scientist have died in eruptions." "Volcanology is a young and dangerous science one that pits us against the power of the Earth itself." "We live on a fiery planet." "Nearly 2,000 miles beneath our feet, the Earth's inner core reaches temperatures of 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit." "Molten rock, or magma, rises to the earth's surface, a cold, rigid crust fractured into some twenty plates." "When magma breaks through crust it becomes lava, and gives birth to volcanoes." "Most blossom along the unstable boundaries where one plate dives beneath another, or two plates spread apart." "Earth's oceans conceal some 80 percent of all volcanic activity." "An underwater ridge 46,000 miles long marks the boundaries between spreading plates." "Lava fills the gaps." "This deep sea fire fuels hot springs." "At more than 700 degrees Fahrenheit, water rich in sulfur supports an entire ecosystem, in the total absence of sunlight." "Some volcanoes rise from the deep." "November 1963." "Just south of Iceland, fishermen report explosions." "Within days, the windswept isle of Surtsey is born." "Earth's fire also forged a tropical paradise." "The Hawaiian Islands are the work of a single plume of magma burning its way across the pacific plate." "There may be no finer setting for the spectacle of the living earth." "With nearly continuous eruptions dating back to 1790," "Kilauea is the most active volcano on earth and one of the most benign." "At 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, its fluid lava can flow for miles, and ruin real estate." "But it can generally be escaped at a brisk walk." "This congenial fire has been attracting tourists for over a century" "It also captured the attention of an eminent east coast geologist," "Thomas Jaggar." "He believed, the only way to know a crater is to live with it a visit to Kilauea in 1909." "convinced him he had found the most livable volcano in the world." "In Jaggar's day," ""volcanology" meant little more than a short term expedition to the aftermath of a major eruption." "It was too little, too late." "In 1912," "Jaggar founded what today is called the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory." "Serving three decades as director, he measured earthquakes, collected gases and charted subtle changes in Kilauea's slopes." "Eventually, he successfully predicted several eruptions." "Many consider him a founding father of modern volcanology." "Today, Hawaiian volcanoes are the best studied on the world." "Decades of firsthand observations are revealing patterns and precursors." "Predicting eruptions is almost routine" "Each volcano is unique, with its own pulse, its own life cycle." "But one rule of forecasting applies to all:" "The key to the future is the past." "Sakurajima." "The "island of fire," in southern Japan." "A noble man commissioned these watercolors to commemorate an eruption in 1779." "Written accounts of this volcano's fury date back to the eighth century." "Sakurajima is home to some 7,000 people." "Another half million live just across the bay." "This life at the foot of an active volcano." "Sakurajima has been consistently active since 1955." "It erupts up to 400 times a year, and drops millions of tons of ash on its surrounding." "Local scientists forecast these outbreaks with impressive accuracy." "Residents tune in for ashfall reports." "Eruptions are as commonplace as changes in the weather." "And ash clean-up is a way of life." "Soil enriched with ash yields prime produce, such as loquats." "But each fruit requires individual protection from airborne assaults." "As does every school child on Sakurajima." "Most ash collects on the volcano's slopes harmless until it rains." "In a flash, rivers can swell into mudflows that wash out roads and bridges." "Safety channels equipped with sensors and surveillance cameras, help contain the threat." "Volcanic mudflows can travel up to forty miles an hour, and sweep up boulders the size if cars" "When the rains end, tons of deposits are dumped in the sea." "It's a model system." "But at any moment, Sakurajima could break all the rules." "1914." "Lava buries six villages." "More than half the islanders lose their homes." "Twenty-three drown trying to swim across to the mainland." "The anniversary of the 1914 disaster is observed each year with an evacuation drill." "For a day, residents abandon their homes to the volcano." "A long, familiar history of eruptions keeps these volcano-dwellers vigilant." "Consider them lucky." "Most volcanoes lay quiet for centuries then take is by surprise." "A few of the deadliest have been labeled "extinct"" "Some 35 centuries ago, a Mediterranean island sparkles with art and science." "Then suddenly Santorini blows itself apart." "Seawater rushes in where once stood a mountain and a civilization vanishes beneath the waves." "The legend of Atlantis still haunts the place today." "79 AD." "Few residents of Pompeii realize Mount Vesuvius is a volcano." "Those who know believe it will not harm them." "Showers of scalding ash seal them in their final agony." "1815 Mount Tambora, Indonesia." "Some 20 cubic miles of debris are launched sky-high." "Most fall back to earth." "But a cloud of ash circles the globe for several years, blocking the sun." "1816 is the "Year without a summer."" "In Europe and New England, snow falls in July." "Crop fail, and 80,000 starve." "It's the most powerful eruption in the last 10,000 years." "By contrast, the 1980 explosion of Mount Saint Helens was almost 80 times smaller." "Yet it packed the punch of 500 atomic bombs." "Magma contains gases that expand violently as they reach Earth's atmosphere." "It's like pulling the cork on a bottle of champagne the size of Mount Everest." "A volcano need not explode to be deadly." "Lava too thick to flow can ooze up slowly, and form a teetering heap of hot rock." "Collapse triggers a searing avalanche of pulverized rock, gas, and ash called a pyroclastic flow." "At 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and more than 100 miles an hour, it consumes nearly everything." "1902." "The Caribbean town of Saint Pierre prospers at the foot of a sleeping giant until May 8th, when Mount Pelee unleashes a pyroclstic flow." "In two minutes, 30,000 people are incinerated." "One survives." "Though badly burned, this prisoner was somehow protected by the thick walls of his cell." "Elsewhere, the devastation is eerie." "Pyroclstic flows are virtually unpredictable and relatively rare." "Many volcanologist have seen them only in photographs." "May, 1991." "Southern Japan." "Mount Unzen serves up an extravaganza some 35 pyroclastic flows a day." "The flows are small." "But a village lies too close for comfort." "Evacuations are ordered." "From a safe distance, villagers find the spectacle irresistible." "No less captivated, journalists and volcanologists from around the globe flock to the scene among them Maurice and Katia Krafft." "In the volcano world, these are superstars." "Here you have a pyroclastic flow." "It don't occurs all the time." "When you have lava flow, then it will happen all the time." "It's why this is so interesting, because you have very few." "After more than two decades of filming eruptions, the Kraffts have a discriminating eye." "Today, Unzen underwhelms." "This is one of the smallest pyroclastic flow I have seen." "I hope to see bigger one than this one because this is very small really, yes" "This is no idle bluster:" "Maurice and Katia Krafft have probably seen more eruptions, at more volcanoes, than anyone on earth." "The Kraffts hail from France, but "home" is wherever then earth breathes fire." "For me, an active volcano, especially volcanoes that I know very well, those are like friends, there really is a sort of dialogue between the volcano and me." "I don't know exactly why." "For me, the danger is not important," "I am afraid when I go in a car, but on volcanoes I forget everything and there is no more danger for me." "For the Kraffts, there has never been another calling." "I fell in love with volcanoes when I was seven years old." "I saw my first volcano with my father Stromboli, in Italy." "And this was really a discovery for, for me, to see a mountain, a sort of cone and at the top to have a fire." "to have explosion every minute, was fantastic." "And I have seen this eruption from very bear." "And I was really fascinated, so I decided to become geologist." "I fell in love without seeing active volcanoes." "I have seen films and photos and was, uh, interested in geology, and so you decided to be volcanologist." "And only two years later I asked to my parents to go to Italy to see really the volcano." "And I was also impressed when I see for the first time what I wish to do." "We met in fact at the University." "I was in geology and Katia was in geochemistry." "So I was crazy about volcanoes, she was crazy about volcanoes, and so we loved each other after, it's an aftereffect of loving volcanoes." "When we went to Vulcano, in Italy, we were a group of friends, we were students at this time in geology, in geochemistry, and so on." "So we stayed at the foot of the volcano and we were making a lot of research, but with a very low amount of money." "And I remember that we don't had so much clothes at this time, but those gasses are so acid that our clothes were completely burned with a lot of holes in it because of the gases." "So, after two or three days we were looking really like beggars." "From the start, the Kraffts photographed their fieldwork." "Soon, films and photos became their bread and butter." "Through the lens, they would share their passion for volcanoes with the entire world." "Iceland, 1973." "The isle of Heimacy was abandoned in a single night." "On this empty stage, the Kraffts stood spellbound." "My work is different from other volcanologists because, uh, when I see an eruption, sometimes it's so nice that I just drop my instruments, and look." "That is to say, I cannot only study the eruption." "I want also to film volcanoes, to show it to other people." "So, I am as much interesting in aesthetic than in science." "As was often the case." "The Kraffts were the only foreign filmmakers on the scene." "Katia and Maurice had no children, no academic appointments." "Nothing to tie them down." "One year they circled the globe eight times." "Tanzania, 1988." "They shot the first footage of lava flows at a unique volcano called Lengai." "I think, really, to see Lengai from near is something that is outside the earth." "I have never seen such an unusual volcano than this one." "And what is very peculiar for this volcano is that those lava are black, it's not mud, it's lava." "And once you see those black lava flows going the here and there in this crater," "24 hours after emission those black lava became white." "We were very surprised by the fluidity of this lava and with this low temperature because it's only 500 degrees Celsius." "And to take this samples of lava with this spoon." "And what was very exciting also that in the night it was red, like other lava." "The Kraffts never denied the dark side of volcanoes." "The face of human suffering." "The numbing devastation." "For UNESCO, they began producing safety films on volcanic hazards, shown around the world." "Footage of aftermath was impressive, but the Kraffts aimed to capture pyroclastic flows in action." "Alaska, 1986." "A close encounter on the slopes of Augustine produced amazing footage and whet their appetite for more." "We have seen so much big eruptions that now we wanted to see bigger and bigger and bigger and these don't happen so often, so, sometimes we have to wait, a one year or even two years to see something really enormous" "and more enormous it is, better it is for me." "The quest leads them to Mount Unzen in 1991." "They set up camp inside the evacuation zone indifferent to the possible danger." "I am never afraid." "Because I have seen so much eruptions in 23 years, that even if I doe tomorrow, I don't care." "On June 3rd, Maurice, Katia, and a bevy of journalists move to a valley about two miles from the summit" "It's a fatal miscalculation." "Something triggers a pyroclastic flow about ten times bigger than all that came before." "Within moments, it overwhelms the valley." "By the time a TV camera I the village record this scene," "Maurice, Katia and 41 others are dead." "Surely, no one loved volcanoes better than Maurice and Katia Krafft." "Every time we marvel at their films, we are seeing the world through their eyes." "And for a moment, it's as though they are with us again." "November 13th, 1985." "A Colombian volcano, Nevado del Ruiz erupts around nine p." "M." "Part of its summit glacier melts." "Water cascades down canyons, stripping them of soil, trees, boulders." "Soon, the mudflow is 130 feet deep." "Just before midnight, nearly 30 miles from the volcano, it engulfs a city called Armero." "23,000 people are buried alive." "Only weeks earlier, scientists had surveyed the volcano and determined Armero was at risk." "Somehow, their report was shelved." "Yet a simple evacuation plan could have saved thousands." "On the ruins of Armero, volcanologists vowed, "Never again."" "One year later, the US geological Survey helped create a unique program." "Fifty miles from Mount Saint Helens, the Cascades Volcano Observatory is home base for the Volcano crisis Assistant Team." "With a cache of portable monitoring equipment, the five-man team can mobilize at a moment's notice." "Hey guys, I just got a request from Bob Tilling." "A mission begins when a foreign nation asks for help in assessing a volcanic threat." "Andy Lockhart has ten years experience in rapid response." "If there is a typical mission, it would consist of getting the call on Friday afternoon, going to the books, finding our if it's a volcano that we don't know much about." "If it's a full blown response we'd take an entire observatory." "We'd take all of the sensors, all of the computers and that takes some putting together." "Lockhart and his teammates have seen action at more than 15 volcanoes in 13 countries." "Their most memorable mission took them to the Philippines." "April 2nd, 1991." "Fifty five miles northwest of Manila." "Plumes of steamare spotted at the summit of Mount Pinatubo by tribesmen who have lived on its slopes for generations." "They've never seen anything like this." "Word reaches Ray Punongbayan, director of the Philippine Institute for Volcanology and Seismology in Manila." "It has 4 seismometers near the volcano." "They reported that they were recording over 400 volcanic quakes and that's unusual." "Right then and there," "I said that something unusual is happening inside the volcano." "The reports arouse concern at Clark Air Base just 15 miles form Pinatubo." "At the request of the US Air force and the Government of the Philippines, a team from the US geological Survey arrives at Clark on April 23rd." "They begin briefing a Crisis Action Team directed by Colonel Richard Anderegg." "I think I was like most people, I didn't know a lot about volcanoes until the United States Geological Survey Team came here it was a total educational process for me." "I had, you know, when I thought of a volcano," "I thought of a volcano like in Hawaii where the lava flows out at a nice leisurely pace and people take pictures of t and it's a, a very pretty thing to watch." "A joint U.S. Philippine science team sees a different picture form the air." "Pinatubo has no written history of eruptions, but it's surrounded by huge deposits of ancient pyroclastic flows." "Lockhart and his teammates see the threat in a whole new light." "For two weeks, they install a monitoring network on ridges around the volcano." "Lockhart outfits each station with a radio transmitter that sends data to a makeshift observatory on Clark." "Pintubo's activity increases daily." "The science team urges local authorities to consider evacuations." "It's a big responsibility in the sense that you are causing people to move out of their abode and transfer to evacuation centers and suffer there and wait for something to happen and, if nothing happens, then, uh, our reputation is at stake." "So, we were very careful about that." "June 5th." "Swarms of earthquakes prompt a level 3 alert:" "Eruption possible within two weeks." "Twenty thousand Filipinos living within six miles of the summit are ordered to relocate to temporary shelters." "But the Air force stays put." "Scientists brief the Senior Officer at Clark, General William Studer." "They admit there is a chance the volcano may not erupt at all." "June 7 th." "Pintubo releases clouds of ash." "The science team issues a level 4 alert:" "Eruption possible within 24 hours." "Most ominous is the appearance of a plug of thick lava the kind that generates pyroclastic flows." "General Studer wants to see it for himself." "Lockhart remembers his conversation with another scientist." "The general says, God, that's a lot of ash!" "and Hoblitt says, that's nothing!" "And he points out these big ignimbrite sheets, these things that look like a Japanese parasol stretching out ten kilometers in every direction from the volcano and says," "See these big sheets out here, this is what this volcano does when it erupts." "And then we wheel around in the helicopter and he says," "There's your base down there." "And you could see it very obviously at the leading edge of one of these sheets that came down that valley." "And so we headed back to the base." "And the general says to Jeff Grime, he says, uh, 'Do it tomorrow. '" "With those words, Studer orders the evacuation of Clark." "One June 10th, some 14,000 Americans leave for a Navy facility, 25 miles away." "A small security force, and the science team stay behind." "After the base was evacuate on June 10th, we felt two ways about it." "One, that it could happen any time and the people were gonna be safe." "On the other hand, now that the base was evacuate, the clock was really starting to tick." "A century of volcanology is put to the rest." "From afar, an entire nation awaits the unknown." "June 12th, 8:51 am." "The wait is over." "Pintubo blows an ash column nearly 12 miles into the sky." "Communities fifty miles away are showered with ash, and sand." "Eruptions continue for two days." "The evacuation radius is enlarged." "More than 80,000 people leave their homes." "Clark radar now shows a major typhoon headed straight for the Philippines." "Exhausted from round-the-clock shifts, the science team suspects the worst is yet to come." "June 15th, 2:00am." "Pintubo's finale begins." "At dawn, pyroclastic flows stream down the volcano's flanks." "There's concern its entire summit may be collapsing." "Ash fall turns 10 am black as midnight" "When the typhoon comes ashore, rain and ash mix like wet concrete." "Continuous blasts overwhelm monitoring stations." "It's time to consider the possibility that pyroclastic flows might reach Clark." "I went out to look out the front door." "And I was standing there looking onto the darkness." "You could see some runway lights about a quarter mile away from us," "looking towards Pintubo." "Little line of red lights." "And I thought, well, if it comes down thisfar, it'll, it'll cut those lights." "And if it cuts those lights, I'll run like hell towards the back of the room." "And that's about 400 yards if it's coming 60 miles an hour, that'll give me about enought time to make it to the back of the room for whatever it's worth." "And that was the most terrified I think I've ever been, standing there looking at those lights listening to that eruption." "Around 2pm, the largest explosion yet knocks out all bit one of the monitoring stations" "I noticed that without much big ado and really no organization, each of the volcanologist was making sure he had his napsack packed with the kinds of things that if he was going to have to leave he could grab very quickly." "And when that particularly larg eruption occurred about three of those guys turned around and picked up their bags off the floor and they weren't slowing down when they went out the door." "So, I figured if it was good enough for them it was good enough for the rest of us." "Clark is finally abandoned." "Around midnight, the eruption is over." "By morning, people return to towns crushed by ash." "Collapsed buildings claim 300 lives." "But tens of thousands are saved in the largest evacuation ever staged as a result of eruption forecasts." "For volcanology, it's an unprecedented success." "Still, Pintubo's summit is gone, in the largest eruption on Earth on half a century." "Over two cubic miles of debris blanket the landscape." "Rain wreaks havoc with those loose deposits." "In the days after the eruption, mudflows claim hundreds of lives." "With each typhoon season, mudflows claim more homes and more lives." "Some two millions people have been affected." "Echoes of the eruption are likely to plague the region well into the 2 1 st century." "Today, Pintubo sleeps again." "But for how long?" "The earth harbors some fifteen hundred potentially dangerous volcanoes." "More than half a bullion people live within their reach." "To live on harmony with volcanoes may be little more than wishful thinking." "But for better or worse, we could not exist without them." "If not for the fire within, the earth would be a barren sphere, worn smooth as a blue marble." "Volcanoes provide the lifeblood of our planet." "They build mountains, and create new land." "Their fireworks recycle life giving gases and minerals." "Most atoms in our bodies were once inside the Earth." "Volcanoes brought these atoms to the surface." "No matter where we live, we have all been touched by fire." "That has got to be a violent tornado." "Get those kids in that basement." "Get 'em in that closet." "Get away from the windows." "Get away from the windows." "Get away!" "Get away!" "People underneath the girders of this overpass." "They're still hanging on." "Oh my God, we're having an earthquake." "Wait a minute." "Hold on." "Hold on." "Can you feel that?" "There go the lights." "Oh!" "We have a major fire burning near San Francisco's marina district." "We have the band now approaching the coast." "So we're just starting the long period of about 12 to 16 hours when we're going to experience the thrust of this hurricane." "Can we spend most of our lives learning how to control ourselves and our environment?" "And suddenly, you wake up with the realization" "I am not in control." "In cities all across the world, we go about our daily routines, secure in our surroundings, confident that our lives are orderly and predictable." "But at any moment, that confidence can be shattered, as nature demonstrates that it still has the upper hand." "When we least expect it, when we're least prepared, disaster can strike." "And few disasters are as unsettling as an earthquake." "The quake that hit San Francisco on October 17, 1989 was actually centered 50 miles away, near a mountain called Loma Prieta." "Even in an area accustomed to earthquakes, this one struck like a hammer." "It was tremendous, believe me." "I just held on to dear life." "There was a sudden movement like this, shaking, whole store rattling." "I mean, the roof, everything, the beams." "My TV screen popped out, and glass began to break, you know, things like that." "Big marble table flew across the room and shattered like glass almost." "The Loma Prieta earthquake lasted only 15 seconds, but in that quarter minute, northern California suffered six billion dollars in damage, and 62 people lost their lives." "Earthquakes are not nice." "The ground is moving beneath one the very essence of stability is questioned." "And that's quite apart from the damage, the destruction, the deaths." "There's something awful about an earthquake and it's not fun at all." "My guess is that earthquakes are really so scary because you don't have any warning." "It's the only thing besides a nuclear war that can really one second you're living in a big beautiful city and ten seconds later, it's flat." "Earthquakes leave their trail of destruction on every continent." "In 1948, the city of Fukui, Japan was leveled by a tremor several times more powerful than atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki." "Mexico city was struck by a huge earthquake in 1985." "Nearly 10,000 died in the greatest disaster in Mexican history." "In September 1993, a quake devastated the Indian state of Maharashtra." "In spite of warning shocks, most of the victims were asleep when their houses collapsed around them." "Every day the earth is shaken by hundreds of small earthquakes." "Most go unnoticed." "They usually occur along the boundaries of the thin plates that cover the earth like an eggshell." "Driven by the heat deep within the earth's core, the plates grind against each other along lines call faults." "When the plates find their motion blocked, stress builds up." "Finally the fault gives way." "The released energy races through the earth in the form of seismic waves." "One place where the boundary between plates is dramatically evident is the 700-mile-long San Andreas fault." "This is the source for most of California's earthquakes." "But for California, as for much of the world, the movement of plates like these is also an indispensable creative force." "If we didn't have earthquakes, if we didn't have this great flow of heat from the interior of the earth, the earth would be a cold, dead place." "If it wasn't for this great flow of heat, there'd be no continents, no oceans, no atmospheres, the earth would be as dead and dry and cold as the moon." "Everywhere you look in California, the hills are really created by, by the action of the earthquakes, for the most part." "It's really the earthquakes that create the topography, the valleys, the mountains, control the river streams, where things go." "Earthquakes have been shaping the landscape of California for eons." "It's only in the last few hundred years that civilization has gotten in the way." "Around the turn of the century," "San Francisco was a booming metropolis, an emblem of California's newfound prosperity." "But on April 18, 1906, that prosperity was shattered by the most famous quake in American history." "Most of the city was destroyed in the tremor and the fires that followed." "Much of charred rubble from those fires was pushed into San Francisco Bay, adding to an existing landfill that eventually became part of the city itself." "Today, that landfill lies beneath a section of the marina district." "This was the area hardest hit in the 1989 quake." "The problem here is the rubble from the tremor of 1906, buried underground." "Shaken by the new quake, it literally fell apart, and so did much of the neighborhood." "The practice of building on such unstable ground is a problem throughout the world." "Mexico city was built on top of a dried-up lake bed." "The 1985 quake was actually centered hundreds of miles away, but it turned the soft land under the capital into a nearly liquid mass." "The buildings simply collapsed;" "victims were crushed under tons of concrete and steel." "It's a modern nightmare:" "urban infrastructure crashing down around us." "As geologists and engineers like to remind us, earthquakes don't kill people, buildings do." "Certain structures, like bridges and freeways, are especially vulnerable to tremors." "In San Francisco's quake, most of the deaths occurred on the Nimitz Freeway, when a one-and-a-half mile section of the upper deck collapsed on the roadway beneath." "Ed McVey was driving a freight truck when it happened." "There was no traffic." "I was doing about 55, and all of a sudden it felt like I had a blowout." "I had no control over the truck." "Luckily, there was nobody beside me because I was just all over the place." "I hit the brakes." "In the rearview mirror," "I could see what looked like the freeway falling, and that didn't make any sense." "I saw cars and trucks disappearing underneath the rubble." "And I just knew I was dead." "I had no way of getting out of it." "There was nothing I could do." "McVey was lucky that day:" "his truck just happened to stop under the only section of freeway that didn't fall." "I don't deal with it as well as people think I do." "I can be driving along anywhere, and all of a sudden I've got freeway falling down on top of me." "Ed McVey escaped without a scratch." "Forty-two other motorists died." "Five years later, when an earthquake hit Los Angeles, there was a similar freeway collapse." "Fortunately, the tremor struck before dawn, when the road was virtually empty." "Next time this could happen at rush hour." "Yet overall, in spite of the freeway disasters and the loss of some apartment buildings and houses," "San Francisco and Los Angeles weathered their tremors extremely well ° ° ° largely because most of their tall buildings were constructed with earthquakes in mind." "Too often, in other parts of the world, that's not true." "In December of 1988, a relatively mild tremor struck the Armenian city of Leninakan, and its acres of cheap, shoddily constructed housing." "Eighty percent of the city was destroyed, and more than 25,000 people killed." "Specially trained dogs were brought in to help locate survivors and victims standard practice in such urban catastrophes." "Fortunately, Leninakan was a small city." "Tang-shan, in northern China, was not." "Just before dawn, on July 28, 1976, an earthquake tore through Tang-shan." "It was the first quake in modern history to score a direct hit on a major city." "As nearly as anyone can tell, it left close to a quarter of a million people dead." "Entire families were wiped out, so it was impossible to find out from the survivors exactly how many had perished." "Besides falling buildings, earthquakes create other special problems in urban environments:" "broken gas lines spark fires, and broken water mains can make fire fighting nearly impossible." "We have a major fire brewing in San Francisco's Marina District." "In the 1989 quake, the San Francisco Fire Department battled 34 major blazes simultaneously." "With underground water supplies cut off, fireboats had to be used to pump water from San Francisco Bay." "Unfortunately, earthquakes in large cities, with their accompanying horrors, are not rare events:" "When you look at a map of the world and plot the truly great cities of the world, and compare it with a map of the great really destructive earthquakes of the last thousand years, there's an almost one-to-one correspondence." "I think we may find ourselves witnessing a large number of destructive earthquakes in the next three or four decades that is going to really horrify the world." "The next great urban earthquake may happen in Tokyo." "This vast metropolis, with its population of more that 27 million, lies near the busy intersection of three tectonic plates." "Small tremors are an everyday occurrence here, and big ones strike all too frequently." "In 1923, Tokyo was nearly destroyed by a massive earthquake." "Much of the destruction, and most of the 140,000 deaths, were not caused by the quake itself, but by the fires that raged on for days afterward." "September 1, the anniversary of the 1923 quake, is commemorated every year as "disaster day."" "Fire departments and emergency crews stage public demonstrations, while ordinary citizens can get a sense of what a major earthquake feels like, and try their hands at putting out fires." "The Japanese are proud of their earthquake preparedness, and they have good reason to be." "Modern Tokyo boasts some of the most advanced earthquake-resistant architecture in the world." "Its skyscrapers are "smart buildings"" "incorporating features like motion stabilizers and internal gyroscopes." "But the vast majority of Tokyo's eight million buildings are older, wood-frame structures." "They're squeezed along narrow, twisting streets that could prove to a night mare for fire fighters." "To make matters worse, the city is fringed by an incendiary jumble of oil refineries, fuel storage tanks, and chemical plants much of it constructed atop unstable landfill on Tokyo Bay." "In short, even earthquake-conscious" "Tokyo is a disaster waiting to happen." "The unsettling reality is that no place in the world is completely safe from earthquakes° ° ° not even areas where tremors are rare, and preparations nonexistent." "The eastern United States and Europe are hardly hotbeds of seismic activity," "but large quakes have occurred nearly everywhere on earth at one time or another, and unlike lightning, earthquakes do strike twice." "It's just a matter of time." "No other force in nature can come close to matching the power of an earthquake - except one." "Tornadoes strike with the intensity of a quake and the surgical precision of a guided missile." "They have the power to fascinate as well as terrify, and with the advent of video camcorders, the terror is being well documented by home moviemakers." "This is in Haysville, Kansas." "It's gonna' hit our house, Mom." "Just looking for it to hit this tornado." "Sometimes a cameraman gets more than he bargained for." "On a lakeshore in Minnesota° ° ° an idyllic summer afternoon is about to be transformed by the arrival of a tornado." "Look at that funnel." "Within seconds, curiosity will be replaced by panic." "Look here." "Look at the highway trees." "A power line just went out." "A power line just went out." "Look at it." "Oh ° ° °" "This is cool." "There it goes." "Here it comes." "Here it comes." "It's right out here." "I'm ten feet from it and all the electricity, all the power lines are going." "I'll film from the inside." "We're filming." "Hold it right there." "Don't stand by the windows." "There goes the windows." "Oh, get away from the windows." "Tree just blew over." "Get away from the windows." "Get away." "Get away!" "Get away!" "Get away!" "Where is everybody?" "Where is everybody?" "Oh no!" "Where is everybody?" "Oh, my God." "Are you guys okay?" "These tornado victims were incredibly lucky:" "there were no injuries, and only superficial damage." "The devastation is usually far worse." "A tornado can strike in any country." "But more twisters develop over the midwestern United States than anywhere else." "And in their wake, they leave a trail of destruction and despair." "Simulated in a laboratory, a tornado is fairly simple to analyze." "It's really a whirlpool of converging opposites:" "upwelling warm air confronts down-tumbling cool;" "dry air encounters moist;" "winds aloft collide with winds below." "In nature, that produces torrential rains, dangerous lightning and hail storms, and violent winds of up to 300 miles per hour." "Tornadoes travel fast, especially across the flat landscape of the plains." "When a television news crew found themselves trapped in the path of a Kansas twister, their only sensible option was to take cover." "Let's go, let's go, let's go." "Go, go, go." "Shoot it." "You better floor it." "You better floor it." "Shoot it." "We're all right." "Just stay here." "You're okay." "You're okay." "Keep going, man, keep going." "Faster?" "No." "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah." "Lots faster, lots faster!" "Lots faster." "Greg, it's catching us!" "You gotta go, buddy." "You gotta really go." "You gotta blaze, buddy." "Yeah, we want to jump out." "We want to get in front of the van." "Get under here!" "Keep rolling." "Yeah, I'm rolling." "Got it?" "Let's go!" "Get up under the girders!" "Get up under the girders!" "Is that where we want to go?" "Yes." "Underneath the girders." "Keep rolling." "Hang onto the girders." "You're all right." "You're okay." "Tornadoes are among the most destructive of all natural phenomena, and in the United States alone, they're responsible for dozens of deaths every year." "But a tornado cuts a narrow path, and rarely lasts for more than 20 minutes." "Even more devastating are the forces unleashed by tropical cyclones, called typhoons in the Pacific and hurricanes in the South Atlantic and Caribbean." "These monster storms can be hundreds of miles wide and last for days, tearing vast swaths of destruction." "Tropical cyclones visit some parts of the world with frightening regularity, and cause staggering losses of life and property." "In 1970, a huge typhoon struck what was then East Pakistan, leaving more than 300,000 dead." "Frustrated in part by the slow pace of relief efforts, the people of the region seceded a year later and created the new nation of Bangladesh." "Bangladesh continues to be pummeled frequently by killer typhoons, made worse by storm surges wind-driven walls of seawater that flood this lowlying country." "In the Western Hemisphere, the islands of the Caribbean and the southeast coast of the United States are prime targets for hurricanes." "And the most destructive natural disaster in U.S. history was Hurricane Andrew° ° °" "We have the band now approaching the coast." "So we're just starting the long period of about 12 to 16 hours when we're going to experience the thrust of this hurricane." "When Andrew struck Florida on August 23, 1992, its winds were clocked at 164 miles an hour, and they were still climbing when they broke the wind gauge at the National Hurricane Center." "The storm hit hardest just south of Miami." "Though it came and went here overnight," "Andrew, like all natural disasters, left behind a legacy of ruin." "It created massive environmental damage that could last for generations." "For the survivors, life would never be the same." "No insurance." "My car is devastated, but I'm not the only one." "You know, there's quite a few people that are going through the same thing." "Look all around." "It's a very lost feeling." "Pictures of the family." "That's my niece and my great° ° °" "Before it began its rampage across South Florida," "Andrew was born, like most hurricanes, as a cloud disturbance off the African coast." "Swirling storms are formed when warm, moist air rises and cools." "The storms grow larger and faster as they race westward, developing into violent cyclones that can rip through the west Atlantic from June to November." "The hurricane's center, known as the eye, remains calm, but the eye walls are packed with intense thunderstorms that generate fierce, gusty winds." "And winds have rarely been as savage as Andrew's." "The storm left a total of 62 people dead." "And it left parts of South Florida a wasteland." "This hurricane caused more destruction of property than any other natural disaster in the history of the United States." "We're talking in the order of 15 to 30 billion dollars." "It could have been much worse." "Andrew missed the densely populated center of Miami by only 20 miles." "As it was, 160,000 people were forced from their homes." "Besides the thousands of personal tragedies, there was an immense environmental problem." "In one day, hurricane Andrew created at least three million tons of garbage° ° °" "There was enough burnable debris to fuel fires at more than a hundred sites at some of them 24 hours a day." "The smoke was bad enough, but Andrew created other, more insidious dangers." "Mike Palmer's specialty is containing hazardous and toxic spills." "After Andrew, he and his crew sifted through devastated neighborhoods for household hazards." "Now, what you may normally see with one house and the typical chemicals they'll have..." " Like, you know, a small thing of acetone or a thing of brake fluid, and here's some clear stain you know, you'd say well what's the big deal?" "You know, what's..." " How bad could this really be to the environment?" "Well, you know, if I opened this up, and I poured it on the ground here, you know, would it absolutely contaminate the groundwater for this whole area?" "No, it probably wouldn't." "But we don't have that here." "What we got here is we've got these quantities or more in every single house." "And if this equipment comes in here and they rupture these containers and it goes in the environment all at once like that, it is too much." "This is only a fraction of the hazardous waste recovered from the wreckage of thousands of homes." "No one knows how much toxic material remained unaccounted for." "In the chaos following a natural disaster like Hurricane Andrew, human survival is the first priority." "But animals are victims too." "Miami's Metrozoo lay directly in Andrew's path." "The zoo suffered serious losses, including hundreds of prized tropical birds, and five large mammals." "Miraculously, most of the animals came through unharmed, even though they were out in the open, exposed to the fierce intensity of the storm." "No one knows quite how they survived, because no one was around to watch." "Many of the zoo's exhibits were ruined." "And it will take decades to replace the crucial shade trees." "But the long process of recovery began right away." "I've received checks and letters from every state in the country supporting the zoo." "People who've never heard from before." "People who've never been here." "And I think one of the most moving things in that whole situation was," "I received a check one day, and I noticed the return address was from Homestead." "And Homestead is here in South Miami, and it was probably the most devastated area from Hurricane Andrew." "And I opened the letter, and there was a check there, and it said, "Please, please accept this donation in memory of our daughter, Naomi Browning who was killed in the storm."" "You feel almost guilty that something has not happened to you because there's tragedy's around you like this." "And here you have a lady sending you a check in the memory of her 12-year-old daughter who happened to have been a volunteer here at the zoo, volunteered her time." "And I said, "Ms. Browning, why?"" "And through her tears, and as she was crying on the phone and talking to me she said, "Ron, prior to this beam falling down and crushing her, the only thing she kept saying all night long was" "'Mom, I'm so worried about the animals at the zoo."'" "In the aftermath of a hurricane, the survivors must try to make the best of what remains." "It's a long, slow process, restoring shattered lives and replacing broken dreams." "But the residents of South Florida must also come to terms with the certainty that another big hurricane is on the way, perhaps next year, or the year after." "The long-term problem is that people build their homes in areas most vulnerable to tropical storms." "All across the globe, if coastal development continues unabated, more and more people will find themselves in the paths of major hurricanes and typhoons, and those storms could be more expensive and more deadly than ever." "Most natural disasters are mercifully quick:" "earthquakes last only seconds." "Tornadoes rarely touch down for more than a few minutes." "Even hurricanes come and go in a matter of hours." "But a flood is a disaster in slow motion." "It can last as long as the rain continues to fall, as long as the water continues to rise." "Some floods are of biblical proportions, dragging on for weeks or even months." "Such a flood was the one that struck the Mississippi Valley in 1993." "The people who live here are accustomed to the river's perildic rise and fall," "They've often joined battle with the elements to preserve their homes." "They refuse to remain passive in the face of disaster." "But 1993 brought the worst deluge in a century and a half." "The Mississippi became a monstrous adversary, and the struggle would last for months." "The waters from nearly one quarter of North America drain down the upper Mississippi and Missouri Rivers." "In the spring of '93, their tributaries were overwhelmed by relentless rain, turning the land between the rivers into what some called a "sixth Great Lake."" "By mid-July, with record crests converging at St. Louis, dozens of town downriver faced the danger of being wiped off the map towns like Ste." "Genevieve, Missouri." "Founded by French settlers in the 1740s," "Ste." "Genevieve is the oldest European settlement on the western banks of the Mississippi." "Some of its French colonial architecture exists now here else in the United States." "And if the river had its way, that rich heritage would soon be gone." "Where the waters were held at bay, the town owed its safety to a makeshift wall of sandbags and an extraordinary volunteer crusade." "People from all walks of life from the locals to the National Guard joined hands to try to save what was left of Ste." "Gen." "The battle raged all summer long, as the river continued to rise." "But in one way, the people of the Mississippi Valley were fortunate." "As they waited for each new crest, they could prepare for the onslaught." "But many floods happen fast, too fast for any response." "In southern France in 1992, torrential rains raised river levels as much as 50 feet in just a few hours." "The resulting flash floods overwhelmed defenseless towns, and dozens drowned." "The people of Ste." "Genevieve had time to meet the river's gradual advance, and they were ready for the worst." "One of those leading the fight was Vern Bauman, a local contractor." "Vern was president of the Downtown Levee District, the agency responsible for maintaining the dikes now swallowed by the river." "He coordinated the efforts to save what was left of the town." "Did you get any sleep tonight?" "Well, what 15 minutes or what?" "We got contractors." "We got the National Guard in here, and a lot of civilian help and local people here." "And we got we just start coordinating everything, trying to get the unions to work together." "And it's just a minute° ° °" "Sonny, we're gonna' need we're gonna' need ° ° °" "The rising tide had brought a flood of people to the town as well, nearly 10,000 from 34 different states." "But in spite of all their efforts, after two and a half months of flooding, more than half of Ste." "Genevieve lay underwater." "Temporary levees wove through town creating an artificial waterfront." "A man-made island rose where Wehner Street had once met North Main:" "the work of four families who banded together in a desperate battle to save their homes." "And they seemed to be winning, at least for now." "But in the struggle to hold back the river, the families had faced a heartbreaking decision:" "only the homes of those who could stay and fight were protected by the dike." "It was agreed all at one time that all five was gonna' be here." "Then later one house was not included, and I really feel bad about this one." "It belongs to Henry, Henry Stackle, and he's, he's in his 70s." "And he was always one who always fought." "A few years ago, he probably led the area up here." "Now, he's the river just keeps coming back, and he's not as young as he used to be." "He's a very hard fighter," "and I guess this is the first one he ever lost." "This skirmish had been hard-won, but the compound was, at best, only a makeshift substitute for the permanent levees, the ones that had failed." "Those had been built by the Army Corps of Engineers, as part of a vast network designed to tame the Mississippi." "Over the course of a half-century, the corps had constructed some 2,200 miles of concrete-retaining walls and earthen embankments, designed to defend towns and farms, and "correct" the river's natural course." "The farmers themselves, together with state and local governments, had built thousands miles more." "But the plan created new problems." "For 10,000 years, the great floodplains of the American Midwest served as a natural spillway for their rivers." "Only in the last few centuries has civilization encroached on the river's domain." "As the river walls were extended and raised, they cinched the flow tighter and tighter, and the speed and pressure of the water built up behind them." "When the river could no longer be held back, it would strike with a force and impact multiplied by the tremendous volume." "That's what happened in the summer of '93 at places like Kaskaskia Island, nine miles south of Ste." "Genevieve." "There, no amount of effort could maintain the levees or save the town." "It was an amazing sight." "The Mississippi River flexing its seemingly unlimited muscle." "Dozens of homes and other buildings including the town's church, all underwater." "Some islanders believe the flood will be the death of a community whose history goes back nearly 200 years." "Now all of Kaskaskia's inhabitants, human and animal, were forced to take refuge on the only high ground available:" "the very levee that had failed them." "Yeah, there's water on the whole island and all around the dike." "Probably the only part right now that does not have water on it are the very high ridges out in the center, and the water's going to continue coming up." "It's continual rain up north, and a lot of dikes are broken both north and south." "So I'm sorry to tell you honey, but we lost everything, but us." "I love you, sweetheart." "We'll see ya' later, okay?" "All right." "Bye-bye, hon." "I just wanted to get off." "I wanted my kids, my husband off." "My furniture's all still there." "Everything we worked for." "Had dogs, cats, two cows." "But I got my family." "My husband was born and raised over here." "I don't want to come back." "I'm not gonna' lose it again." "All over the mid-west levees have provided the fore sense security for the growing populations of the floodgate." "By the end of the summer of 93' 2/3 of all the levees have been bridged thoro-top." "As the river continue disturbed your sort." "Throughout the world, and throughout history, people have always settled on floodplains, taking advantage of their fertile soil, and the rivers' own resources." "In many places they must be protected by artificial levees, and levees have a tendency to fail, sometimes with catastrophic results." "In China, in the 1930s, floods breached the levees along the Yangtze and Huang Rivers." "The Yangtze floods killed three and a half million people in one of the greatest natural disasters of this century." "Around Ste." "Genevieve, even where the levees were higher than the crest of the flood, the river could still find a way to penetrate them." "After eight waterlogged weeks, trouble spots were cropping up on the earthen walls." "Better get some bags here quick." "Even a small seep of water could pose a grave threat." "In just minutes, this situation went from threat to catastrophe." "Unwilling to give in after fighting so long," "Vern Bauman took one last gamble, and drove out to the break." "With luck, Vern hoped to stem the tide and buy time for those families whose homes stood in the waters' way." "He took earth from wherever he could, even the footings of the levee beneath him." "As hard as he worked, he was no match for the river." "Soon, the outcome was clear." "All that remained was to pull men and machines off the crumbling embankment and evacuate the houses behind." "There was two chances, slim and none, once that truck fell in." "What amazed me about the whole thing was how quick it went." "Throughout the Midwest, the floods of 1993 took a tremendous toll:" "$10.5 billion in damage, 56,000 home flooded or destroyed." "306,000 square miles underwater, and some 50 lives lost to the river." "As for the town of Ste." "Genevieve, it had been saved, at least most of it." "But hundreds buildings were lost or damaged." "Ste." "Gen can't afford many more victories like this one." "There were important lessons to be learned from these floods, and some people took them to heart." "In the past, most flood victims had returned and rebuilt as a matter of course, but this time would be different." "In some places, the river will be allowed to keep the land it reclaimed." "Thousands of acres of low-lying farms will be left open for future flooding." "Many families and even entire towns have decided to give up the struggle and move to higher ground where they'll be safe the next time the river floods." "These changes in practice and policy amount to an admission that we can't fight nature and win." "It's finally becoming clear that we can't prevent natural disasters, but perhaps we can learn how to predict them ° ° °" "In California, scientists are trying to predict earthquakes." "The site is the sleepy little town of Parkfield." "Just about every 22 years, a powerful earthquake rumbles through here." "And when the next on hits, seismologist Allan Lindh hopes to be ready for it." "Parkfield will really be our first opportunity anywhere on earth to really capture an earthquake in all its glory, to really be sitting there waiting with all our tools out and sharpened and waiting to go." "The U.S. Geological Survey has spent millions of dollars wiring parkfield." "All over the valley, highly sophisticated instruments, like this laser, are poised to detect the tiniest movement along the San Andreas Fault." "If the earth shifts even a few millimeters before a quake strikes, seismologists may be able to issue a warning." "The parkfield experiment is not just designed to predict when an earthquake will happen, but also exactly where it will strike." "It's based on an idea called the "seismic gap theory."" "Seismic gap theory is really just a very simple notion." "And all it says is since motin is occurring all along a plate boundary, there are gonna' be earthquakes everywhere along it." "And the places that haven't and 'em lastest are going to be the places to have them "next-est."" "By pinpointing places with the greatest likelihood for a quake, scientists and urban planners can focus on protecting buildings, and people." "But geologists can't create an earthquake in the lab." "The only way for them to test their theories is to wait for one to happen, and hope they're still around afterwards to analyze the data." "Panning back." "I've got to get this updraft just once in my life." "Observing tornadoes presents its own challenges, and thrills." "Every spring and summer, tornado season in the Midwest, an army of amateur storm chasers is out in the field." "And video cameras are now standard equipment." "That has got to be a violent tornado." "Going head-to-head with a twister is an obsession for both amateur storm chasers and professional scientists." "It may look like fun, but it pays off with valuable information about the birth and behavior of these killer storms." "There goes the windshield." "Just as important as direct observation are remote sensing techniques like Doppler radar." "Over the past two decades," "Doppler radar has revolutionized the study of tornadoes." "First used by the military to detect unfriendly missiles," "Doppler is so sensitive it can track the movement of insects 40 miles away." "In the field, portable Doppler radar units can be used to record data at dangerously close range." "I'm on the left side of that tight circulation and I'm gonna' go over." "With the information they've compiled, scientists are creating computer models of severe storms to learn even more about their structure and behavior." "As with earthquakes, the key to avoiding catastrophe is alerting the public." "At the National Weather Service, scientists have introduced NEXRAD, the "next generation" of advanced Doppler radar." "NEXRAD's enhanced imagery makes it easier to spot tornadoes as they form, and that can save critical miuntes in alerting those in the twister's path." "Hurricane prediction is also becoming more precise, as scientists gain a new perspective on these giant storms, with the help of powerful new tools like the space shuttle and weather satellites." "And as the accuracy of forecasts improves, hurricane fatalities are declining." "The beginning of the hurricane conditions will start there anytime after dark this evening." "Today when hurricanes form over the Atlantic, the National Hurricane Center in Miami serves as a central clearinghouse analyzing data, issuing forecasts, and, most important, broadcasting warnings, to the public." "There's a fine line between alerting the community and creating panic." "Evacuations are expensive, and false alarms can damage public confidence." "But in the face of an approaching hurricane, it's a good idea just to get out of the way." "Like floods, earthquakes, and tornadoes, hurricanes remind us that there are powerful forces beyond our control." "We have not conquered nature and we never will." "But perhaps we can learn to survive nature's fury."