The Insane Engineering That Built Ohio

In 1919, an engineer named Allen Hazen put a warning in print: too many dams built by the hydraulic method had failed. At that exact moment, in Ohio's Miami Valley, a public district was building five dams that way, along a river that had flooded the valley six years earlier. The only real test was going to be the next big storm, and nobody gets to schedule one. This is eleven Ohio jobs that looked close to impossible on paper, ranked on how impossible they looked, how much was riding on them, and whether they're still doing their job today. We start under Central Parkway in Cincinnati, at a finished subway that never carried a passenger, and climb through Cincinnati Union Terminal and its half dome, the Cleveland water tunnels under Lake Erie and Garrett Morgan's rescue, the Deep Cut on the Ohio and Erie Canal, NASA's giant vacuum chamber at Plum Brook near Sandusky, Terminal Tower, the Hulett ore unloaders, the Roebling Suspension Bridge, three thousand miles of ditch in the old Great Black Swamp, and the bucket that's all that's left of Big Muskie. Number one is the gamble Hazen warned about, and we find out how it held up. Is there a bridge, a lock or a ditch near your town that the old-timers still talk about? WATCH NEXT ▶ Exploring Ohio:    • Exploring Ohio: Small Towns, Hidden Histor...   SUBSCRIBE ▶    / @ohiouncovered   Historical documentary. Names, dates, and cases are drawn from the public record and published reporting. Some footage is illustrative. #Ohio #OhioUncovered #Engineering