Original subtitles

Tom ward (narrates): A bizarre and treacherous landscape

where people settled despite the untold risks.

These colours are psychedelic,

these are danger signs,

these are warning signs, it feels unnatural.

An idyllic tropical island that felt the full force of nature.

On the radio they announced what was happening

and people couldn't quite believe it.

This hadn't happened in nearly 300 years.

No-one was really taking it seriously

it took the whole island by surprise.

A ghost fleet laying stranded in the desert sands.

It's a very odd thing seeing a boat in the desert,

a boat is,

is an indicative sign of water

but then you look around and there's none available.

And a collection of battered structures

which are revealing mother nature's secrets.

An entrance gate collapsed,

a running track twisted and cracked

and then it starts to dawn on you this place was a school.

Crumbling remains.

And ruins of lost worlds.

They were shaped by extraordinary events

and are now haunted by the past.

Their secrets waiting to be revealed.

In Ethiopia's northern afar region

a supernatural landscape is fraught with dangers.

This is one of the most otherworldly places on planet earth.

This strange landscape completely devoid

of any sign of plant or animal life,

strange colours, pools of iridescent water,

fumaroles, hot Springs,

there's really nothing else quite like it.

It's an alien landscape

where yellow green and red colour

these mystical geological formations.

This place is really a furnace,

there's no shade to be found for miles there's,

there's no vegetation

and you've got the sun beating down on you,

it really is a hot bed.

You would never imagine finding people here,

yet there are signs of life.

Rising up out of this strange blasted landscape

you see the ruins of some kind of community,

you see some, some houses, broken down trucks,

some pipes,

bits of infrastructure

but everything kind of encrusted and growing

right out of the material that makes up the ground itself.

Today the village looks desolate and abandoned

but at one particular time

there was a group of people determined enough

to make this their home.

It's nicknamed the land of the dead,

life can barely survive here

so why one earth would anyone build a village here?

Worku kebede is a local guide

who is an expert on this dangerous place.

So, this is afar,

we have a really brutal geology here

so we come across a lot of skeletons.

It's one of the lowest and hottest places in the world,

it's around 400 feet below sea level.

The Mercury here can sky rocket to almost 50 degrees celsius.

But it isn't just the temperatures that make this location so hostile.

You walk around this area

you can hear the, the sort of salty crust,

er, crumble under your feet in fact it's quite dangerous

as you get close to some of these,

er, stagnant pools they can be, er, a ph of one or less,

they can be just like sulphuric acid

and so there is a danger

that if your foot falls through the crus

you can actually burn your skin

so it's, it's quite a stark environment.

It's part of a rift valley system

where two tectonic plates are essentially pulling apart

and the earth is literally getting ripped open.

Yet flanked by steaming fishers

lay the shattered remains of a settlement,

this is the town of deloll.

So, there's no much to see here

but there are clues as to what happened in the past.

There's buildings, there's bits of machinery,

there's bits of material on the ground

that was evidence that people were living here,

what a place to live.

The answer lies beneath your feet.

This crazy landscape where biology keeps in to chemistry

is clearly why man came here.

This is the,

the location where you have a volcano

is actually erupting through all of these salty layers.

That interacts with that bedrock

and it starts to dissolve the salt

and you get really remarkable erm,

acidic hydrothermal fluids.

It's laden with all kinds of chemicals and salts

and that's what causes

all these strange colours and pools

and geysers and fumaroles that you see.

It's a chemical wonderland.

And there was one element in dalol's chemical cauldron

that was in demand around the whole world.

There is one particular mineral deposit known as pot ash

which is a mish mash of various chemicals

but it has a lot of potassium in it.

It's almost unique

to have such concentrations of pot ash

actually at the earth's surface.

And without much processing

you can literally scrape the pot ash off the earth's surface.

Pot ash this amazing thing

that we use in fertilisers and other chemical reactions

and here it is on the surface of the earth.

In 1912,

two Italian adventurers obtained the first pot ash mining concession

and industrial excavation of this precious resource

soon began.

There was a big demand for the pot ash,

agriculture was increasing around the world,

there's a big demand for fertiliser

so more workers began to flood in to this community

to be part of this operation.

Once here they built houses however they could.

The people who came here to dig the mines

lived in houses like this.

Which they built from local salt rock.

In such a harsh and remote location

everything including drinking water

had to be bought across the parched land.

But the mining community in dalol prospered.

Here you can see a generator that was used for water

and the wires they used for electricity.

The blistering heat and unstable earth below

didn't deter those seeking their fortunes.

Soon larger companies followed

and in 1945

a 45 mile long railway line was built

to transport the precious pot ash

to the port of mersa fatma in modern eritraya.

The railway really opened up production

and it also opened up the town to other people.

At it's peak 50,000 tonnes were being mined,

this was a place of opportunity,

a place where fortunes could be made.

Pot ash flowed out of dalol

but the working conditions were punishing.

There's acidic waters floating around,

you've got sort of noxious fumes.

Er, salty fluids getting in to your hands.

The miners were working in the hottest place on earth.

This had to have been a perilous environment at best.

Still the potential of what could be found here,

what could be extracted outweighed the risks.

They developed a thriving little operation

but it wasn't going to last.

The unrelenting heat

and the risk of volcanic disaster

threatened to shatter dalol.

But in the end it's decline was driven by changing economics

following the first world war.

It became easier to get pot ash

from different sources in Germany and the usa.

The minute the global market for pot ash changes slightly

all of a sudden you're tipped from profit to non profit

and when there's no profit people leave very very quickly.

Since then various international operators

have tried to exploit the rich resources

that lie under the baking Ethiopian sun.

But mother nature was always against them.

It is no surprise

that the word dalol itself means disintegration.

Anything that's metal is rusting,

you've only got to go and see what's happened to a Land Rover

or another truck that's only been there

for, for a few tens of years and it is literally in pieces,

the place is horrible place to live.

Mother nature didn't set up this environment

to be friendly to be humans

and I think it took a few decades but humans eventually got the hint.

Though the village lies desolate and abandoned now,

not all the mining in the area has stopped.

There's no longer

any industrial mining of these resources

but people from the local afar tribe

will often come in often at night

with camel caravans and carve out large slabs of salt,

load them on their camels and take them out to market.

When you look at ruins like this village

it really does bring home

how determined humans are to exploit the environment,

how determined we are to make money

to create wealth wherever that should be.

And visiting dalol is still fraught with dangers

old and new.

Just 60 miles from venice

in the mountains of northern Italy is a mystifying sight.

Looming above the town of longoronay,

one of the world's tallest dams

appears to be holding back nothing but empty space.

In the aftermath of world war two

Italy turned to hydro electricity to power it's shattered industries.

Hydro electric power

is incredibly attractive in a mountainous region

because if you can have a tight valley

and you can trap water high up

you've suddenly got that ability for that water

to move down hill very quickly and generate free electricity.

Engineers constructed the vajont dam.

It was the centre piece

of an ambitious hydroelectric network

that would bring energy to the cities of northern Italy.

And in 1960

the three mile long reservoir behind it

was filled with water.

Throughout the construction of the vajont dam,

there were repeated warnings

both from locals and expert geologists

that the mountain behind the dam was extremely unstable.

When you're filling the dam up with water it's a lot of weight,

a lot of pressure that's being exerted

on the sides of the valley.

On the 9th of October 1963 they were proved right.

Over nine billion cubic feet of rock broke away from the mountainside

and hurtled in to the reservoir below.

It wasn't just a mass of earth that slid away in to the reservoir,

it was the ferocious speed at which it came.

45 seconds for effectively

half of the mountainside to drop in to the water.

The landslide pushed a Tsunami of water over the dam

and down the gorge towards longarone.

The force down such a tight gorge,

it displaced all of that air

and it was almost like a shockwave of air

hit the village directly before the water did

and started destroying some of the buildings.

Next minute a wall of water hits you,

it's got rocks in it, it's got trees in it,

it is like liquid sandpaper and it just wipes the village clean.

The town was obliterated and nearly 2,000 people were killed.

The tragic irony of this story

is that whilst the villages below the dam

were completely destroyed by the onrush of water,

the dam itself remained completely intact.

However with the reservoir packed full of debris

this mighty construction was abandoned.

Today the vajont dam

remains a testament to the dangers

of underestimating the forces of nature.

From an engineering perspective

the vajont dam should have become

one of the most impressive dams in history,

instead it's become one of the most infamous.

On the lush Caribbean island of monserrat,

a once idyllic retreat was built right in the firing line.

The hills level out in to coves

and the beaches give way to forests.

There's a quiet rugged beauty to this place.

Large houses nestle in the hillside

and the views must be amazing for the people who live there,

it feels like an exclusive private island resort.

This island is so lush and green,

you can see thick forest

and mountain ranges reaching right up to the clouds,

you can clearly see

why it's been called the emerald isle.

The devastation wrought on this site

was not confined to a single area.

But a vast tract of the island.

There's a variety of different types of buildings and,

and in them you can see

things like government documents are lying around.

One is round with many rooms and beds inside,

another is full of office equipment,

another you realise is part of a shopping centre.

There's bits of infrastructure lying absolutely everywhere.

Amongst all the decay you can see all these buildings

once had opulence.

However lived here, used to live the high life.

It feels as though everyone left in a rush.

There's crockery on the tables,

video tapes were left on the floor,

important documents are left on desks.

What caused everyone to leave in such incredible hurry?

More and more buildings reveal themselves

all equally annihilated,

this isn't just a few houses on a hillside

that have been destroyed, this is a whole town.

Taking a closer look

reveals a clue as to what happened here.

When you look all around

there's a grey material on the ground,

it seems to have silted up all of the buildings

and covered the whole area in a grey Sandy material.

Just ten miles long and less than seven miles wide,

this is the tiny island of monserrat.

Local guide Norman cassell

is one of the few remaining residents.

He remembers the island's capital Plymouth

before disaster struck.

Plymouth was really a special place.

It could have been a hustly and bustling town

but it was always still

a bit of a relaxed atmosphere here.

Plymouth now lies within a perilous exclusion zone.

Getting in to this area is not easy

and it gives you some sense of

just how serious this disaster was

and how it hasn't ended, it's still ongoing.

This was a main road

leading right in to the centre of Plymouth.

The capital's wrecked infrastructure

serves as an eerie reminder of it's lively past.

A lot of the business people

stayed at the flora fountain hotel

because of it's location in Plymouth

and so it was very popular with the business folk.

25% of this small nations economy came from tourism.

This was just a wonderful place.

The rich and famous gathered here,

people from different parts of the world.

For conferences, parties, weddings.

And now they all gone.

The grey ash that coats Plymouth

provides the answer to what happened here.

This is the soufriere volcano.

It looms over the former capital

and the whole of southern Montserrat.

It has been dormant for more than 300 years.

The islanders had almost forgotten about it,

it had never occurred to them

that it would stir at all let alone emit steam and ash.

On the radio they announced what was happening

and people couldn't quite believe it,

this hadn't happened in nearly 300 years.

No-one was really taking it seriously,

it took the whole island by surprise.

Well it started out with us hearing this sound like jet engines.

People thought like for me I was wondering if erm,

was there something going on with the,

the us government because there were times

when we would see low flying fighter jets,

f18's, f16's skirting around these areas

and we were saying well it must be

those Navy or air force planes that are flying low.

But then it was so constant so people were saying

wonder what's happening and then it sounded

that it was coming from the hills.

In June 1995,

the soufriere hills volcano burst into life.

What we never knew

that it was the initial cracking of the rocks

and the steam venting

which created that sound

until there were a few bits

of black ash dusting areas

and it is after that that it was final,

that it was actually vol, the start of volcanic activity.

Compared to other volcanic events

the 95 eruption was relatively tame,

the earth's fiery magma had not yet reached the surface.

These are eruptions which occur

when magma meets ground water

and flashes that to steam

and it can break open and break open the rocks

and make sort of, big thunder clap noises.

It also spewed out so much ash

that Plymouth was plunged into darkness.

My goodness at times it was like turning day into night,

you can put your hand in front of your face

and you couldn't see your hand it was that dark.

As the first layer of ash coated everything in it's path,

scientists flew in from all over the world

to figure out what the volcano would do next.

Seismologist Roderick Stewart was one of them.

When I first came here I was basically full of questions,

trying to find out what was going on and things and,

and this is a type of volcano that can change very quickly

from looking very calm to being very dangerous.

A month after that first eruption,

the activity increased

and scientists felt

that they could no longer guarantee

the safety of the people in that part of the island.

Plymouth lay in direct line of fire

so residents were evacuated to the north of monserrat

out of the volcanoes deadly range.

Many of these structures

are the remnants of their abandoned homes.

Your home

was your pride and joy in Montserrat,

you can see all these buildings on the slopes,

all beyond, all these abandoned buildings,

billions of dollars of people's sweat and tears.

But many could not be persuaded to leave their homes behind.

Every day the residents had to make a difficult decision.

Stay and watch your business collapse

or leave and save your life.

The islanders managed to live with the volcano

and despite the exclusion zone

returned to as much of a normal life as possible.

Everyone understood the risks and chose to live with them.

While Plymouth had been covered in a layer of ash,

the volcano hadn't yet released any lava.

But the scientists feared the worst was yet to come.

The lava that comes out of this volcano is so viscous

that it cannot form a lava flow,

so it just comes out

and it stays at the top of the volcano

and it builds for what we call a lava dome.

The lava dome blocked the mouth of the volcano,

effectively a plug sitting on top of an unstoppable force.

The question was how long would it stay in place?

Many residents had already been evacuated

but some chose to play a deadly game of chance.

Some people started to defy orders

and go back to the strict exclusion zone.

With the volcano's cone blocked by solidified lava,

pressurised magma

had been building up deep within it's core.

June 1997

the volcano finally unleashed it's full fury.

It got to a point where it couldn't sustain itself,

it, it collapsed with a major eruption.

June 25th, er, 1997 when folks lost their lives,

those were some, some of the longest days of my life.

As acting airport manager,

Norman cassell witnessed the terrible events unfolding.

It was almost like

a continuous set of pyroclastic flows.

Pulse after pulse

and then there was some larger and larger ones

and the scientists sounded the siren for evacuating the airport.

You've got an avalanche

of pulverised lava and ash and gas.

They travel very very fast

and they basically just smash everything in their way

so they are very very dangerous.

You saw the clear line of demarcation

where that pyroclastic flow came down

and struck these buildings.

But then the hospital

and those other buildings high up on the slope were untouched.

So, it just amazing

how different parts of Plymouth were just devastated in a way

and then others were just left standing.

Millions of tonnes of ash were deposited

across a vast area

filling all the valleys and river beds.

For the residents who had returned to their homes,

the results were deadly.

As it got later towards evening and...

She walked all through those hills

and came and she met us down below here

and she said you know I'm the only one who made it.

There were some other staff

who had gone up there

and never saw them again.

Sorry.

Over the next four months

the volcano exploded 75 times

burying Plymouth in layer upon layer of super heated ash.

At one point there was a pyroclastic flow

which came and hit the parliament building at the back

and started a fire which lit most of these buildings.

If you look below here you can see some of the charred remains.

At that stage when they saw Plymouth burning,

that was when folks knew

that it is we're not going back to the Plymouth that we knew.

The pyroclastic flows finally stopped

but that wasn't the end of the tragedy.

Montserrat's wet tropical climate

would soon deliver another blow.

Many of the structures aren't buried in lava rock or ash

but mud set hard as concrete.

So, what happened?

When it rains it forms mud flows

which pick up all this material

and they've got immense power and they can bring boulders down,

they can bring trees down.

So, Plymouth now is almost totally buried.

Over the years the lower sections were filled

and then it goes higher and higher

and eventually it covers completely some of these buildings.

The city was now permanently evacuated

and left as a ghost town.

The soufriere hills volcano slumbers, for now.

But it's affects are still being felt to this day.

So, where you had

within Plymouth and it's environments

thousands of households,

having to leave this area and migrate

that's what really broke the camels back

as people decided at that stage

they had to migrate overseas

and so the population went from over 10,000

at one point down to 2,500

and now it's about 4,900 plus.

Away from the destruction in the south,

the north of Montserrat is beginning to show signs of recovery

beyond the volcano's deadly reach.

The population is growing, it's about 5,000 now,

tourism has picked up,

these are tough folks

and they're determined to survive and thrive

even if they have to have a monster for a neighbour.

In Uzbekistan,

a barren desert landscape is not quite what it seems.

Over 40 miles from the nearest shoreline

this stranded ghost fleet feels a long way from home.

It's a very odd thing seeing a boat in the desert.

A boat is, is an indicative sign of water

then you look around and there's none available.

But a clue on the town's signs

suggests those vessels do in fact belong here.

So, what extraordinary event created this bizarre scene?

In the 1960s

the town of moynaq sat on the earth of the aral sea,

the world's 4th largest body of inland water.

Almas tovashiv was one of the many employed

in the booming local fishing industry.

More than 200 vessels

were engaged in the fishing industry

and over 100 vessels

were transporting fish to the fish canning factory

where 1,200 people worked

and annually produced up to 12 million cans of fish.

But by 1990 all the fishing here had stopped.

Somehow the sea had become a desert.

People understood that there was less water,

there was not even water for watering the gardens

or for use on the farms.

Incredibly the cause of this disaster

was man made.

The aral sea was fed by two rivers.

But when Uzbekistan's Soviet rulers

decided to prioritise cotton production,

they diverted that water away from here.

It had devastating consequences.

It was ecological suicide

because once they took all the water out of those rivers

there wasn't enough water to feed the aral sea,

in this hot environment it's sunny most of the time,

there's a lot of evaporation

without water continuing to flow in to it

the aral sea began to evaporate.

In just 30 years the sea level dropped

by nearly 17 metres

and in places the shoreline receded by almost 100 miles.

Today a third of the sea bed is exposed

uncovering a layer of dust,

salt and the toxic residues of pesticides.

This poisonous mixture

is just waiting to be swept up by the next strong breeze.

Off the coast of mainland China

in central Taiwan

an empty structure sits covered with intricate sculptures.

You come across these highly decorative doors,

these ornate statues and these dragons.

Looking over to this temple,

this wonderful holy building

it looks incredible doesn't it

but as you look further down you realise it's collapsed,

it's all over the place.

It's been completely destroyed,

there's rubble strewn everywhere.

This is wuchang temple in the town of gigi,

it's almost intact roof draped over the rubble below.

And when you look inside

you see smashed concrete and leaning pillars,

almost like it's been pulverised from the inside.

Yet for some reason this ruin has been preserved.

It has become a memorial,

pilgrims visit and legends swirl around the temple.

What forces were at play here?

Were they purely natural

or did something more sinister take it's toll?

Wuchang temple is not as ancient as it appears.

Built in 1923

this isn't the only structure on the island

that displays terrible damage.

15 miles away in tai chung city,

an even younger building lies in ruins.

You see a three storey building

with floors collapsed in

and what looked like rooms of varying sizes,

it actually looks like quite a functional building

but as you really peer in to it

you begin to see what looked like chairs

and even blackboards.

An entrance gate collapsed,

a running track twisted and cracked

and then it starts to dawn on you this place was a school,

you only hope the children weren't inside

when this destruction took place.

This is guangfu junior high school.

Many in Taiwan remember the day

that bought devastation to the school and temple.

For luo weizhen,

September the 21st 1999

was a day that changed his life forever.

I got back home around 11,

I went for a shower and prepared to go to sleep.

Around 1am I suddenly felt a severe headache.

Then I felt like I was eating rocks, I was buried alive.

I thought was this the communists?

Historically Taiwan has had a complex

and tense relationship with mainland China

so at first many people thought

that China's communist party

had launched a military strike against...

What force decimated these buildings?

Were the communists of mainland China really to blame?

As luo weizhen made his way out of the rubble

a different picture began to emerge.

I climbed out of the ruins and saw everyone was crying.

Then because there were aftershocks all of the houses kept shaking.

Taiwan had not been hit by a communist military strike

but a major earthquake.

Roads buckled,

Bridges collapsed

and landslides diverted rivers

causing formations of completely new lakes.

The earthquake triggered a process known as liquefaction,

soil became almost fluid leading to mud flows,

land slides and avalanches.

In and amongst these rolling hills

that almost looked like

they've been crumpled up like a carpet,

you can see these buildings

that seem like they've been sucked down

in to the earth.

As many as 2,500 thousand people were killed

and 300,000 people were made homeless.

In Taiwan this was the second deadliest earthquake

in recorded history,

it exposed nationwide short comings

in the building and construction industry.

Taiwan's construction industry really took off in the 1990s,

there was a massive boom in building

and what we're looking at here

is what happens when design codes

and factors of safety,

they're paired down to the minimum.

Lessons had to be learned.

Actually the 921 earthquake

is a collective pain shared in Taiwan.

Even if we tried to forget it, it's a lesson, a lesson in history.

We hope our government will enforce education

and raise awareness about natural disasters.

How to take preventative measures and adapt.

Incredibly Taiwan has

between 20 and 30,000 earthquakes annually.

Only 20 to 30 of these are strong enough

for people to actually feel

but it really highlights the need to prepare

for future generations

so they don't suffer in these events.

And the 921 earthquake

as it became known

offered a great opportunity to do exactly that.

In 1996

a vast network of detectors

had been installed across the country,

they collected huge amounts of data.

It was the first earthquake in history

to be recorded in such precise detail.

Before the earthquake was crucial

in informing the country about earthquakes

and preventative measures.

It bought about huge change.

Chloe huang works as a guide at this school

now preserved as a memorial.

The classroom was built right on the faultline.

And this road was built along the faultline.

As you can see

the impact these buildings suffered was absolutely huge.

But the school offers something else,

something totally unique.

This is one of the fault lines in...

It strikes past the playground of the school,

you can see here

there used to be a running track

but the track here has been lifted up.

As the two plates along this boundary

pulled apart and lifted up the school was torn in half.

This was the first time an earthquake fault line

could be seen and analysed in such detail.

The running track also protects the exposed fault line

from further erosion.

This was a huge moment in the research of seismology

and the development of earthquake proof

engineering and construction.

So, out of this massive disaster

came great civil engineering challenge,

how do we keep people safe in the future?

It was the dawn of a new era,

although the unstoppable forces of nature

had taken a devastating toll,

Taiwan would choose to tackle them head on.

The wreckage and destruction sparked a new era

in research and civil engineering.

The piece d'resistance was this.

Taipei 101 opened in 2004

and it was a real statement to the world.

But to an extent

it was also thumbing it's nose at mother nature saying

we can take whatever you've got to throw at us

and they even built

some of the stories in the pagoda style.

We're talking about

what was the highest skyscraper in the world at the time.

It still represents a marvel of cutting edge design,

it has isolators,

dampers and a shock absorber

that sits between the 88th and 92nd floor.

So, when the building sways

these dampers absorb

all of that earthquake energy and reduce vibration.

In gigi the wuchang temple sits frozen in it's destruction.

Like Taipei 101

it's design was inspired by the ancient wooden pagoda's

found across this region.

As with many of Taiwan's buildings

it's designers hadn't accounted

for the full potential of earth's tectonic forces.

When the 921 earthquake struck it collapsed in to the dust.

Today many still bear the scars of that infamous day.

I haven't slept well for 20 years,

the aftershocks remain,

they remain in our hearts.

And like all Taiwanese people he's ready for the next warning.

When the government's sensors pick up an earthquake,

a message is instantly sent to everyone's phone in the system

it tells them where the epicentre is

and it tells them the magnitude of the quake

so they've got time to prepare

so it's a very sophisticated government warning system

and it's a culture that is preparing itself

for the worst.

Now they are abandoned crumbling ruins,

many remind us of dark times

but some were once beacons of hope and progress,

lasting testimonies to human imagination,

enterprise and spirit.

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