Original subtitles

Tom ward (narrates): There are disaster zones

all around our planet.

The first thing you see is devastation, wreckage,

ruined buildings, torn up highways.

Man: It's actually very unnerving,

it's almost like there's some other worldly movement

going on underneath there, it doesn't in any way feel normal.

Some were struck by unexpected forces.

Others were the victims of human ambition.

I mean, what's actually happening is, is quite frightening

and it's, it's unprecedented in terms of anywhere else

on the earth's surface.

It looks like a post apocalyptic landscape,

you have to wonder was it bombed?

Did anyone survive?

What happened here?

Destroyed by mother nature,

fatal miscalculations or bizarre phenomena,

these are five of the world's strangest disaster zones.

There was an entire town there that's now gone.

Crumbling remains.

Ruins of lost worlds.

Shaped by extraordinary events,

violent forces and human ambitions.

Their secrets waiting to be revealed.

What's happening here is terrifying.

The destructive forces unleashed could be catastrophic.

At number five in the world's strangest disaster zones.

On Japan's east coast there is a confusing picture

of deserted buildings and security cordons.

It's apparent that once upon a time

this was a bustling thriving landscape full of homes,

buildings, factories but now it's just torn apart, destroyed.

There's no question that this entire landscape

was subjected to an overwhelming force.

The whole area looks like some kind of a,

a giant child just tossed it helter skelter.

But just a few miles away

an altogether different scene emerges.

There's something not quite right about this town,

it feels like a zombie movie or like a ghost town.

It's on lockdown, you can't get anywhere near it,

the security fences, you are not allowed in this zone,

it's a no go area.

What's happened in this area is so confusing

because on the one hand there's absolute devastation

and destruction and on the other hand

things seem perfectly normal and fine yet no-one is there.

The big question for me is how are those two things linked?

In the town of tomioka the local high school

now sits vacant and locked up.

Little seems to have changed

since it was last filled with students.

Toshiko (translation): "This is the main school building,

"there were three classes per grade

"in total nine classes were studying here.

"Students would play soccer and then baseball around the back.

"They were training hard."

Toshiko aoki is a former principal of this school.

Having left a few years before disaster struck

she still recalls the promise of its students.

Translation: "Golf, badminton, soccer these were the three sports

"the school was focusing on with the aim of producing athletes

"that would be successful internationally.

"The school programme was therefore designed around this goal."

But in 2011, those ambitious plans for the future

were suddenly put on hold

and the buildings have remained empty ever since.

Hanging on the wall is a stark reminder

of the exact moment tragedy struck.

Translation: "Look, this clock on the school building

"it stopped at 2:46.

"The time on the clock hasn't changed

"since march 11, 2011."

On that day at 2:46pm

a magnitude nine earthquake struck the east coast of Japan.

This was one of the most intense earthquakes ever recorded.

It lasted for three minutes,

usually earthquakes just last for a few seconds.

The earthquake was so powerful

that it supposedly moved the entire country of Japan east by eight feet,

I can't even fathom that.

But while the earthquake caused an evacuation

it was another reason why no-one was allowed back.

Well, here's what's amazing about the earthquake itself

is that it didn't do as much as damage as you'd expect.

Japan leads the world in earthquake preparedness

and they really plan and build accordingly

so when this earthquake hit

it didn't knock down lots of buildings

the way it might have in other parts of the world.

The earthquake though was just the beginning,

this area was to be hit by not just one

but two more deadly events.

The epicentre of the earthquake was 80 miles to the east

in the pacific ocean and that set a second

devastating event in motion.

When an earthquake happens and its epicentre is at sea

the land shifts, yeah, and of course it causes the water above to move

and where is that going to go?

The low lying lands near the coast were now in the firing line.

A Tsunami that at its fastest

was travelling at 500 miles per hour.

It first made landfall at around 15 minutes after the earthquake.

Even though they have very high sea walls

along this coast these waves were high enough

to crest those walls and flood the coastal plain.

A lot of us imagined a big towering breaking wave

but it's really not like that, it's not a single wave,

it's more like a flood of water that flows inland

and just submerges everything.

When you see the pictures of the water

tearing through that landscape,

tearing through people's homes and lives it doesn't matter

whether you live 100 miles away

or you're on the other side of the globe

on a very human scale you can actually imagine

how terrifying that would be.

In the end the Tsunami reached as far as six miles inland,

effecting around 200 square miles of the east coast.

The Tsunami was devastating, it wiped out the coastal towns,

it tore up the infrastructure and some 19,000 people

were killed or missing.

I trained as a civil engineer

and I'm really aware of how you know,

we build our buildings and our structures

to withstand failure but in the face of er,

natural event like that how can we possibly design

to take that in to account

it's phenomenal the amount of power that nature has.

Nearby new efforts to shore up the coastal defences are evident

but while these areas are slowly being reclaimed

other sites remain off limits.

So, you've got some areas that it's clear

there was devastation and destruction

but there are other areas that are just abandoned

that look completely normal.

There's just no-one there and the only people

you can see are security guards.

The fact that there's still security here

and guards patrolling the area

means there's still some kind of threat.

So why is this area off limits all these years later?

On 11 march 2011,

a massive earthquake had triggered a Tsunami.

Sitting directly in the Tsunami's path

was the fukushima daiichi nuclear power plant.

This region got hit really with a triple disaster,

first the earthquake, then the Tsunami

but third the Tsunami knocked out

the local nuclear power plant.

News archive: The nuclear plant momentarily vanished

behind a cloud of white smoke Saturday,

it's not clear how much radiation is leaking from the plant.

The ensuing meltdown caused explosions

in reactor unit buildings one, two and three

allowing dangerous levels of radiation

to leak in to the atmosphere.

And when those nuclear reactors melted down

that created a release of radioactivity

that had an enormous impact on the region.

The government declared a nuclear emergency

and the evacuation order was announced.

Initially only those around a mile away from the plant

were affected but soon tomioka and it's high school

would be swallowed up by the rapidly expanding restricted area.

Toshiko (translation): "For people that time the earthquake was strong

"but the Tsunami only really affected the area by the sea.

"So, the next morning on march 12th everyone was going to go home

"and tidy up but then there was an instruction

"to leave the city immediately,

"there was absolutely no time to prepare,

"people just had to get in their cars and leave."

By the end of that second day the evacuation zone

had stretched to a radius of around 12.5 miles from the plant

but as fears of the radiation spread increased

other areas up to 34 miles away were also evacuated.

In total nearly 200,000 people were removed from their homes.

Translation: "In reality, from the moment

"we left the city on march 12 until the 31st march

"six years later, the residents of tomioka

"weren't allowed back home."

North of tomioka cutting through

what remains of the off limits zone today is route 6.

Route 6 has to be the weirdest road trip

you could ever undertake,

you're not allowed to go too many times in one day

and you're not allowed to stop

anywhere along that particular part of the route.

The radiation levels are just too high

so you're told to keep your windows up

and just keep on going.

Toshiko (translation): "There are houses inside

"but, of course, nobody lives there.

"There are stores around here

"but they've been left completely untouched.

"The same as they were eight or nine years ago."

The nuclear cleanup operation

has been the most expensive in history.

And gradually more and more areas including tomioka have reopened

but the consequences of this tragedy are still plain to see.

Contaminated top soil has had to be removed

in order to stop the spread and you can see across the region

large mounds full of this soil, they're trying to contain it.

Mankind doesn't stand still after a disaster

and although it's difficult and expensive to clean up,

that's what's happening and gradually more and more areas

are opening back up with a clean bill of health.

Translation: "The reason there are so many trucks

"is because they are carrying decontaminated things

"and building materials, either way

"it's mainly work vehicles in this area.

"If the radiation level goes down the evacuation order in this area

"will gradually be cancelled but at the moment this area

"is still a no go zone."

The Tsunami claimed thousands of lives but the fallout

from the power plant has left behind a controversial legacy.

Translation: "The greatest damage

"from the nuclear accident is not the spread of radiation

"or the increase in level of radiation

"but the people's lives that have been drastically altered.

"I think that what is really polluted

"is not the air

"but the soul of the people."

The results of this accidents are so paradoxical

we think of it as a devastating nuclear release

but the total amounts of radiation

were not large enough according to the world health organisation

and others who have studied it to cause mass fatalities

or potentially any fatalities.

But here's the big irony,

in a follow up study they found out that more than 1600 people

who were evacuated died

partly from the stress of the evacuation.

Many of those people were elderly

or suffering from medical conditions.

And toshiko is now helping similar people as an advisor

for the local support centre.

Translation: "Since the evacuation order

"was partially cancelled I moved my residency documentation back.

"I'm living in tomioka city now and doing this job

"so for the people of tomioka

"and for me the disaster changed our lives."

In Columbia county, Pennsylvania,

a whole town appears to have been wiped off the map.

In a way it's a ghost town without the town.

Roads neatly laid out in a grid

suggests this was once a typical American town.

Author David dekok remembers this time well.

This shot was taken in October of 1983

looking up toward the top of town and you can see there was a,

an entire town there that's now gone.

A freeway with no cars.

Foundations yet no houses.

A police station but no police force.

It's the victim of something

that most of us couldn't believe could happen.

Until the 1970s,

centralia was an ordinary American town.

But then people started reporting strange incidents.

Busying fumes, steaming cracks in the ground

and a local boy narrowly surviving a fall in to a sinkhole.

You would see steam coming out of this gigantic highway crack.

People wondered what was causing this,

they may have thought

it was some kind of volcano down there maybe.

In fact, the ground beneath their feet was on fire.

And it's still burning today.

So, this is a borehole and if we unscrew this cap,

we're going to see what the fire is like underneath.

Oh, nice and hot.

I can smell the distinctive

kind of sulphur-ish smell of the fire.

Centralia sits on a vast network of abandoned coalmines,

it's thought a landfill fire found its way

in to this subterranean labyrinth

and began spreading beneath people's homes.

There were citizen groups in centralia saying

hey you've got to get us out of here,

but they still took almost two years to,

to come up with a solution.

In 1984,

the population of centralia was relocated

and the houses demolished.

Today there is little evidence the community of centralia

ever existed but one question remains.

So, how long could it burn?

I've heard figures like 200 years, 250 years

but in the end nobody really knows, it'll go until it stops burns,

runs out of fuel, runs out of air,

neither of those are likely to happen any time soon.

On the Indonesian island of java,

a perplexing disaster reduced an entire community

to a few forsaken structures.

There's homes, there's factories,

there's religious shrines but there's nobody around.

It really looks a very strange environment.

There are roads but they stop at this strange bank

that just seems to cut everything off.

It's got warning signs,

it's not clear what's on the other side

but clearly something did happen here

that has profoundly affected this whole area.

Beyond this barrier further questions are raised.

You can peak over the top you see the strangest thing,

a vast lake of mud and some parts are still wet

and running and bubbling,

other parts have dried and cracked in the sun.

The surface area of the mud is absolutely vast,

this goes on as far as the eye can see,

it's mind bendingly large and the very unnerving thing

that creeps up on as you're looking at it

is a sense of questioning is this still live,

is this finished or is there yet still more to come?

Closer and closer inspection of this muddy surface

you can actually see things on it and see structures.

It's clear that there was something there before

and the mud has now completely draped over everything.

So, how did this happen?

Was this a natural disaster?

Did this happen in a man made way?

Turns out in this case it could be both.

But with the site submerged in mud, experts would struggle to prove it.

In 2006, porong was a flourishing rural area.

Muawanah once lived here.

Muawanah (translation): "This used to be my village...

"Jatirejo village,

"it used to be a prosperous village

"but now all you can see is the mud flow.

"We used to live together as a family

"but now our relatives are scattered everywhere."

This is the lumpur sidoarjo mud flow

also known as lusi.

This was a buzzing thriving agricultural area,

around 60,000 people, there were fields,

there was work to be done, it was a fertile area.

The deluge started without warning on the 29th of may 2006.

Today, the Lucy mudflow coats nearly six square miles of...

And it's still growing.

Translation: "People were running for their lives,

"they were shouting mudflow mudflow mudflow

"and then all of a sudden it got even bigger."

The mudflow buried 16 villages,

24 factories and hundreds of paddy fields

and commercial fishponds.

Translation: "Here, down here was where the houses,

"the cemetery, the school and the mosque used to be,

"now everything is buried by the mud."

Muawanah and thousands more porong residents

have been evacuated ever since.

The impact of all of this mud was utter carnage,

some 60,000 people were displaced,

their homes just gone, the area unliveable.

A gas pipeline was severed resulting in an explosion

that killed 13 people.

What had been a very functional agricultural area

was now a complete warzone.

Translation: "I still remember that day,

"I was running with my children and now I just don't know.

"I'm worried about my children's future.

"Will I be able to put food on the table?

"Will I ever get a decent job now?

"That's what I keep thinking about.

"I don't know I'm just fighting for the children."

Something caused an explosion of mud out of the ground,

it was jetting up more than 10 metres high in to the sky

and it's measured to have been erupting

180,000 cubic metres of muddy material every day.

At first the cause of this deadly phenomenon was a mystery.

Economically it's been incredibly destructive,

it's estimated that it's cost about $3 billion

in terms of lost infrastructure and all the efforts to contain

this mud lake have failed.

Muawanah lived in the town until she and all the other residents

were forced to evacuate.

Translation: "So, this is the mud,

"when it's half dry you can see all the cracks

"but when it's fully dry it's soft like desert sand.

"The mud is salty, the salt content is very high.

"Whoa, yes, that's salty.

"Very salty, this place used to be full of trees

"but now it's like the desert, vegetation can't grow here anymore."

The mud that's leaking out

is not like the mud in your back yard,

it's full of various heavy metals and gas is coming up

with the carbon dioxide and methane

which is also very unhealthy for people

so it's really an environmental catastrophe for the region.

From above there is little evidence to explain

where all this noxious mud is coming from.

So, why did this catastrophic mud flow start so abruptly.

What's clearly happened here is something extraordinary.

People don't just build buildings in and around places

where mud's going to spew out of the land.

The mud that drowns this site is bubbling hot,

this points towards its source.

The complex ever shifting tectonics

below the 17,000 islands of Indonesia

mean that this island chain sits on top of a violent geology.

Indonesia's a, a lively place geologically there's earthquakes,

there's volcanoes but people have been living there

for thousands of years.

This area itself it not necessarily directly affected by volcanoes.

But below porong,

geothermal heat is pushing a mix of underground water

and mud up to the surface where it erupts as a mud volcano.

But the amount of mud coming out

of the lusi mud volcano confounded experts

because it could only come from one place.

The lusi mud volcano

is tapping in to a much larger geological phenomenon.

The gases emitted with the Lucy mudflow

link it to a large active volcano system 10 miles away.

This system can produce an endless supply of mud that powers

through a network of natural tunnels.

But this still doesn't explain

why the lusi mud flow suddenly started here.

There's the real question

as to whether this is entirely a natural phenomenon,

natural disaster or is there something else

that's gone on, something maybe from a human perspective

that's helped to trigger this.

There were suspicions

that an oil and gas exploration company

drilling in porong were to blame.

The process of drilling for natural gas

is really very tricky,

when you drill down into the earth

you go through layers of rock

that keep everything sealed in,

you're punching a hole through that rock

and the gas wants to squirt up out of that hole

and anything that's mixed with the gas, water, oil, muck, mud

that will come squirting up as well.

The gas itself is under huge pressure,

it's like opening a soda bottle you know,

and the way it all comes foaming out.

Some claim that in 2006 below the district of porong,

the unthinkable happened.

A company drilling an exploratory well for natural gas

basically bungled the drilling operation

and that allowed pressurised water and mud to flow up to the surface

from deep underground.

The theory is that this drilling just 200 yards away

from the lusi mud eruption

fractured an old fault system that links porong

to the active volcano.

Now, there was no way to stop the deadly flow of mud.

But the drilling company pointed to yet another cause.

An earthquake a couple of hundred miles away

two days before might have opened up a fault

or somehow set off this flow of mud.

The drilling company claim the earthquake

created the pressure to reactive the fault system.

Many scientists dispute this possibility.

But those whose homes lay buried in mud are in no doubt.

Translation: "Why did they have to do the drilling

"in a residential area?

"Couldn't they have done it somewhere else

"in the forest or something where there are no houses?"

Muawanah and her neighbours have received

a small amount of compensation from the drilling company.

Translation: "They gave us 20% and then they said at first

"that they were going to pay the remaining 80% in cash

"but they didn't."

Today, the volcano is still erupting further coating the surrounding area

in mud from the depths of the earth.

The landscape has been fundamentally radically altered

but actually at heart this is a tragic human story

there are people still fighting for compensation.

For the residents of porong

life has completely changed since the eruption.

It's completely disrupted people's lives,

people have had to move from jobs

from their religious shrines from,

from everyday life and be relocated.

With the local economy in ruins,

muawanah and her friends

now have precious few ways to make a living.

Thanks to tourism people wanted to come and see this,

disaster tourism they're now able to act as guides,

to talk people through their experiences,

to tell them the story and even though it's not

what they would have chosen actually this is now

become the source of their new livelihood.

In the heartlands of Argentine,

the remains of a town are set within a tortured landscape.

A white substance clings to every surface.

Painting this place in a bleak monochrome hue.

And while there appears to be little evidence

of what caused such destruction

it is that bleached layer that holds the answers.

While most disaster zones lie deserted, this one does not.

Pablo (translation): "I'm Pablo novak,

"the only resident left in the ruins.

"I stayed and I was sure someone would come back eventually.

"It used to be so famous,

"so many people used to come here from all over."

These are the ruins of villa epecuen.

For much of the 20th century

this was a luxurious lakeside retreat.

Translation: "This was started as the requio almaza,

"a dance hall

"and because the room was small and lots of people came

"it also used it for a theatre

"with theatre companies coming from Buenos Aires."

The town's main attraction however lay beside it,

the mineral and salt rich lake

famed for its supposed healing powers

no-one foresaw it's true destructive potential.

In 1985 an unprecedented period of rainfall began

and soon the town's flood defences were overcome.

The flood waters gradually slowly consumed the entire town

and by 1993 it was submerged under 30 feet of water

effectively becoming a modern day Atlantis.

In the decades since the water has receded,

leaving behind the evidence of what occurred.

Translation: "Everything that you can see now

"hadn't been seen for 20 years."

And the twist is this highly saline water

left the town covered in a thick layer of salt

giving it this unique appearance.

For Pablo, the town's last resident,

the battle to remain continuous.

Translation: "As long as I can walk talk

"and have a good memory I will stay here."

From silent cataclysms

to the violent forces beneath our feet,

mystifying natural events and man made calamities

it appears that humans have made a habit

of placing themselves in the firing line.

Our final sight stands over 800 miles north

of the arctic circle on the icy shores of Svalbard.

Here, immediate peril looms large

but the cause of that danger threatens the entire planet.

Svalbard feels like it's on the edge of the earth.

It is a brutal landscape,

cold, barren and fierce.

In winter the place is completely covered with snow

and in darkness and in summer you get 24 hours daylight

and so it's a real area of extremes.

The town itself is the world's northern most settlement

of 1000 people or more,

you can't live any further north than this.

As the seasons change and the snow melts,

crumbling ruins appear on the mountainside above the town.

But these old wrecks aren't the only deserted structures here.

Most of the town seems to be doing fine and it's populated

but then you have these pockets that are abandoned.

We're used to seeing old abandoned buildings

on the brink of collapse but these buildings look fine.

There's nobody there and it seems very odd

that you've got something that is clearly relatively modern

it's not, not much has happened to it

but why is nobody living there?

The first clue to what's happening here

maybe found in those collapsing ruins above.

On the edge of town are these old industrial looking features,

just standing there forlorn and forgotten.

The way these buildings have fallen in to this condition

makes you wonder if the same fate

awaits those modern buildings in town.

A deadly threat hovers over this town

and it could yet have far reaching consequences.

The issues that are facing this town are quite serious

and in fact potentially deadly.

Already two lives have been lost.

What's happening here is terrifying.

What we're seeing here is the beginnings of something

that could soon be beyond our control

and the destructive forces unleashed could be catastrophic.

Svalbard was a distant and perilous place

to visit in the 19th century,

over 100 years ago this land held little value for most.

Originally the only people

who would go to this far northern collection of islands

were whalers and people hunting seals

but in 1906 an American named John longyear

came here looking for coal.

Early 20th century, late 19th century the world

is going through changes which are driven by coal.

So, a resource such as coal found in an area like this

is potentially very very valuable.

The town of longyearbyen

grew on the back of the coal industry

but in the modern world the lustre of coal

has diminished and structures like these have paid the price.

More recently coal has become a, a sort of more of a dirty word

than a something people want and so the actual

scaling back of coal mining globally has happened

but it's also happened in, in Svalbard.

A slump in the market could mean less demand for housing in the town

but there is more to this story than first meets the eye.

The apartments that have been abandoned,

that is not related to the decline of coal,

there's a completely different problem there.

These people have been forced out

because of a deadly threat to those buildings.

With all that mining in the area over the years

you've got to wonder if that's created an issue.

Has it destabilised the land somehow?

What danger lurks here

and why have virtually brand new buildings

been abandoned to the arctic tundra?

This group of condemned buildings

are deemed unsafe by the local authorities.

There's nothing wrong with the building,

it's structurally sound.

The problem is the location.

Something has changed that makes it more dangerous.

It's a terrible feeling to see all this empty buildings

standing around and nobody can use them.

Nobody lives up here anymore.

Until recently,

niels lorensen lived in a similar apartment near here.

And he's seen more and more places become off limits to residents.

There are red zones, a lot of places in this area

yeah, and a lot of people are affected by this red zones.

And it cost er, the community and people a lot of money.

We have a kindergarten,

both my kids went there and that kindergarten is closed now.

It's a sad sad story.

During the summer months those apartments are not at risk

but when winter comes the threat level rises.

A few years ago niels experienced this first hand.

I was just cleaning my house

and suddenly lots of big bang in the house

and straight away I understood that this was an avalanche

and it was big, it was er, enormous and had a lot of speed.

I went in my daughter's bedroom and er,

I could see straight out her wall

because of the building has broke apart.

Niels apartment can be seen in aerial footage taken

before the avalanche struck

but it wasn't the first victim.

Other buildings have also been destroyed in recent years.

In 2015 a massive sudden avalanche hit the town,

imagine a huge sheet of ice snow

and stone crashing in to these houses

with such force that it literally lifted them up

and deposited them across the street.

It soon emerged that eight people had been injured

and two people had been killed.

Nobody believed that this could be

so large avalanche that could hit the houses

and kill people and I think no,

nobody thought that could happen.

While avalanche barriers stand above the town today,

for those hollowed out apartments the risks are just too great.

The danger that those other apartments

faced in recent years,

this place now faces that same threat,

come winter they'll be right in the firing line

and the order has come down

to a completely evacuate and demolish this place.

Today it's not only those apartments

that lie inside this red zone,

these structures weren't built in a dangerous location,

the location has become dangerous.

So, what caused this?

These collapsing structures on the outskirts of town

hold the answers.

And there's a startling conclusion being drawn.

The irony here is that the very industry

that built this community also endangers it

and that's the process of mining and burning coal

which releases so much carbon dioxide

into the atmosphere that ultimately it starts to warm the planet.

At the local university,

glaciologist Heidi sevestre has been studying

the changes effecting Svalbard.

At the black curve is the changes in temperatures

globally for the past 120 years

and the orange curve is the changes

in temperatures in Svalbard.

When we look what's happening for the past two or three decades

there the temperature's really diverge

and we see the temperatures in Svalbard

increase twice as fast as the rest of the world.

Since 1971 on average temperatures here have risen

by four degrees celsius,

this is the fastest warming place on earth.

It's like an exaggerated version of global warming

if you will but it has deadly consequences

and it's really changing the local environment

and the people living there have to dramatically

change their lifestyles to cope with it.

For the homes that have been lost already

and for those now in the firing line

this drastic temperature change has made large avalanches

a very real threat.

Today we can absolutely draw a link between climate change

and the 2015 avalanche

and unfortunately our predictions define

that there will be more and more events like this in the future.

Today avalanches are not the only consequence

of climate change facing Svalbard.

It's glaciers are rapidly receding and the archipelago seas

no longer freeze in winter.

The location may be remote

but these alarming events are a warning to us all.

Arctic ridges like this are kind of like the canary

in the coalmine, whatever's happening

to the whole planet is going to happen faster here

because of the weather

there is so extreme in the first place.

It's human nature not to appreciate the scale of danger

until it's right in front of us,

until a catastrophe is actually happening

and if you wait until the snow and ice is sliding down the mountain

toward you it's already too late.

From earth's violent tectonic forces to manmade calamities,

disaster zones across our planet remind us of natures awesome power

and the perils of under estimating it.

But they also bear testament to human kinds ability

to adapt thrive and overcome.

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