Armed & Defenseless

Armed & Defenseless
Episode Information
Episode	8
Season	1
No. in Series	8
Air Date	June 9, 2009
Directed by	Darryl Rehr
Produced by	Douglas J. Cohen (Executive Producer) Louis C. Tarantino (Executive Producer) Sven Berkemeier
Wrtten by	Douglas J. Cohen Darryl Rehr Louis C. Tarantino
Episode Guide
Previous	Sin City Meltdown
Next	Roads to Nowhere

Armed & Defenseless is the eighth episode of season one of Life After People: The Series. It originally aired on June 9, 2009.

Synopsis

In a future without people, the armed and the defenseless are put up on the test. Armed against man, but not against nature, as it declares war from beneath the Pacific Ocean, at the airbase in the Arizona Desert, and Pearl Harbor as the USS Missouri become a target of a renewed attack. The defenseless are just the defenseless as dairy cows die off, the buffalo roam, Aloha Tower shuts down, and even the defenseless Wells Fargo Center in Denver that was armed against avalanche becomes an avalanche itself. The episode also examines North Brother Island off New York City, which was abandoned around 1960, Pointe du Hoc, abandoned after D-Day during World War II, and the USS Arizona.

Plot

Prologue

Nothing on Earth was built tougher than the machinery of war from fighter jets, to battleships, and fortified bunkers. The defenses might offer any protection without people or might just as vulnerable as the most defenseless structures and creatures on Earth.

1 Day After People

In the depths of the Pacific Ocean, a relic of mankind's Cold War continues to be a ticking time bomb. Sank under mysterious circumstances in 1968, K-129 carries a mini-arsenal of nuclear weapons including two nuclear torpedoes and SSN5 Serb missiles with each with an one megaton warhead. The CIA salvaged part of the submarine in 1974 but the rest of it including the missiles remains on the ocean floor, nearly three miles down. Besides of the seven pound plutonium trigger, the warheads are also packed with lithium deuteride, a solid compound that supplies the hydrogen in the hydrogen bomb. The grey salt like substance will explode if it touches water, and at least one of the warheads may have been damaged when the submarine sank. For 1 day after people, the tough metal skins are keeping out the water.

1,800 miles to the southeast, the USS Missouri sits quietly in Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, permanently moored as a museum ship since 1998. It was the last American battleship every launched and the last to be decommissioned, with it being five feet longer and eighteen feet wider than the Titanic. Launched in 1944, it witnessed the Japanese surrender in World War II and the guns fire on their last targets in 1991 during Operation Desert Storm. The USS Missouri is well armed for fighting off enemy places and ships but the device found below deck is her key defense, one of the control units for the Missouri's cathodic corrosion protection system. It prevents rust and corrosion by sending an electrical current to zinc rods attached to the steel of the hull, drawing corrosive reactions away from the steel. However, the process is only effective when the metal is submerged in water, above the waterline, cleaning and painting are the only defenses. It is already breaking down even in the time of humans. Ronald Chavez shows the rust on board the USS Missouri with a lot of the rust happening rapidly once the point system fail and rust on brackets, supporting members on ladders, and the piping systems where it will eventually give way, crash, and fault in foundations.

2 Days After People

Some of the world's most defenseless creatures face a world where they are completely unprepared, like cattle. There are nine million dairy cows in the United States alone and used to being milked two or three times a day. After people, the milking barn is empty and the milking machines are turned off. Bruce Golden stated that the cows are incredibly dependent upon humans and as soon as people disappeared, they were off their schedule and will be confused. He continues that they'd be mooing and vocalizing trying to let humans know that they need some attention. While some develop infections of the udder, the pain and discomfort most suffer will only be temporary. Bruce Golden stated that the vast majority of the cows will be dry up where they stop lactating and the milk will absorb back into the body. However, not all dairy cows are safe. Bruce Golden explains that the animals suffer the most stress and biggest problem will be baby calves due to incredibly vulnerable and dependent upon humans. Baby calves had to be handfed by humans because their mothers are strictly conditioned to mass produce milk paying little attention to their babies. After people, many adult cows are just as dependent on people for food. Bruce Golden stated if the cattle couldn't get feed, they'll wonder, bewildered, and push against the gates. He continues that it they couldn't get the gates open, they'd eventually weaken, lie down, and die.

3 Days After People

4,000 fighter jets, bombers, and other aircraft lie in formation at the Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center in the Arizona Desert. But the fleet is covered in ghostly white and coyotes have prowl into the grounds. In the time of humans, it was a graveyard and storage facility for mostly military aircraft, making them better prepared for a life after people than anywhere else on Earth thanks to the stark white latex coatings also known as Spraylat that keeps the planes in near pristine condition. Jack R. Kruger stated that Spraylat are around the cockpit, fuel cells, fuel tanks, the backbone, every screw, and inside the internal fuel systems where seals. The seals keep out the dust and rainwater and while the white color reflects heat, the interiors of protected aircraft never rise more than 10 degrees above the outside temperature no matter how harsh the sun. Ultimately, the end of the birds of war won't came from the sun, but from the ground below.

4 Days After People

Near Pearl Harbor, the hands on the clock of the Aloha Tower have stop. Installed in 1926, the famous clock is driven by heavy weights, which have now reached the bottom of their cycle. They're reset by electricity every 2 days, but the power is permanently out on the island.

This also means the failure of the USS Missouri;s electrically powered rust protection system. Seawater begins to eat away at the Missouri's hull and the from the skies above, the USS Missouri will come under fire in a new kind of aerial assault.

6 Months After People

The birds of Hawaii are flocking to their favorite island, the USS Missouri. Sam 'Ohu Gon stated that the birds will have no trouble getting into place and would treat it like any other small island. The birds bring new life to the decks of the Missouri by dropping undigested seeds that lodge into the ships 53,000 square feet of wooden decks. Sam 'Ohu Gon stated that Missouri has tear decks where the organic start by buildup of soil and leaf litter within a matter of time.

15 Years After People

Back in Pearl Harbor, the rope of the USS Missouri has reached the end. Ronald Chavez stated that the ship is held to the pier with nylon mooring lines. He shows the line that has a chink in it and continues that after 15 to 20 years, the mooring lines will park and the ship break away from its moorings in Pearl Harbor. The lines of the USS Missouri snaps and the mighty ship pulls away from the dock, adrift within Pearl Harbor.

20 Years After People

At the Arizona Desert, the mummified aircraft waiting in Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center are showing signs of distress, the high winds have scattered the birds of war like toys on a giant playground after 20 years. In the time of humans, the planes had to be periodically realigned. Dave Roe stated that the aircrafts have vertical stabilizer on the rubber making the aircraft behave like a wind vane. He continues that there are microbursts of 120 miles an hour in the area, enough to make most of the aircrafts move around a little bit. Human caretakers also have to maintain the protective coatings on any planes that might be pressed into service again, those that didn't suffered the consequences. Dave Roe shows that the Spraylat on one of the planes are no longer serving its function with rainwater seeping into it and underneath the layer of protection. After 20 years, every plane in the yard takes a beating with paint is wearing and rust corrodes the joints. The canopies are clouding from UV damage and fighter jet engines become homes for birds. Dave Roe stated that the wings on the aircraft are not likely to fall off with the sing structure the strongest in the aircraft, supporting the aircraft in flight and taking all the ground loads in the ground. However, the planes won't stay long enough to lose their wings. Dave Roe shows an example of erosion caused by rainwater runoff which is common to all the aircraft stored in the place. He continues that the chances are very good that the erosion would occurred in a single storm. The desert rains sculpted out soil from below with the desert winds sweep in dust from above, causing the mighty jets to began to be swallowed by the earth.

25 Years After People

At the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, three Russian nuclear missiles of the once K-129 still sit on the bottom of the Pacific with each one megaton warhead contains a substance that explodes on contact with water. It was sealed within a tough metal casing coated with a heat shield for high stress atmospheric re-entry. However, even a small crack in one of the casings can be exploited by the pressure of the deep ocean. After 25 years without people, the sea begins to leak into one of the bombs, but the explosion is muted by the same ocean pressure that opened the crack that it would feel like being crushed by a 1.7 million pound weight. The bomb's plutonium core may scattered over a small area and any sea creatures that came into contact with it would die of radiation poisoning.

30 Years After People

Most of the world's dairy cows have died out even those who found enough food on the farm or were able to escape their pens couldn't find a way to reproduce. In order to keep producing milk, dairy cows needed to be pregnant at least once a year and in the time of humans, it was frequently achieved through artificial insemination with many dairy cows spent their whole lives without laying eyes on a bull. There were exceptions however that there are small pockets of surviving cows begin rapid evolutionary change that take them back to the wild. Places like the plains of Colorado will make perfect grazing ground.

In Colorado's capital city of Denver, the most distinctive building in the skyline is 50 story Wells Fargo Center. Built in 1983, it was nicknamed the "Cash Register Building" after the unique curved shape of its glass covered roof and it was originally designed to be built in Houston, Texas. In the snowier climate, engineers had to install heating coils in the roof to prevent snow from piling up and sliding down the side of the building. After people, the coils no longer function and the building is covered in icy snow that drips moisture into the floors below and periodically, it causes the snow to cause an urban avalanche witness only by downtown Denver.

45 Years

Man's footprint on Earth is getting smaller by the day, and it has a future that already happened less than a mile off the coast of one of the biggest cities in the world, North Brother Island.

North Brother Island

Visiting North Brother Island, it has a population of zero while Manhattan Island in New York City has a population of one and a half million people. Steven S. Ross, along with Michael Feller and Andy Bernick, explores the island and tells the story of its history and abandonment. The first buildings were constructed in the 1880s and served many purposes over the years including housing returning World War II veterans, quarantining victims of infectious diseases, and later treating drug addicts. All of the former residents have left an unusual mark on the island. Steven S. Ross explains the building behind him is an infectious hospital that was built in 1943 and used until 1963 and shows the island's main street where plant life have conquered the pavement with an inch of soil. Riverside Hospital was commissioned in 1881 and demolished in the mid 20th century, with only a handful of its original buildings remain. New York quarantined its most carrier of typhoid fever, Typhoid Mary. She was a special threat to New York, her real name was Mary Mallon who is a healthy carrier. She was confined to North Brother Island on two different occasions with the first in 1907 but she eventually died in 1938 on the island.

North Brother Island was entirely dependent on boats in order to keep its population supplied with everything from food to fuel. Steven S. Ross shows the coal dock that served the island until around 1960. He explains it was the unloading point for barges that bring coal and after its abandon, most of the planks are missing and the concrete platform he standing is sunk and cracked after the wooden pilings have started to deteriorate. Structures that sheltered the critically ill people are in critical conditions with the walls of the oldest of the brick buildings are prying apart, the coal boilers are rusting away from moisture, and the rest of the hospital succumbs to the unchecked growth of insidious plant life. Michael Feller is at the entrance to the hospital and explains that many of the plants growing in the island are brought into it. Invasive vines like kudzu, honeysuckle, and Asiatic bittersweet have taken over the island, giving water birds a new home. Andy Bernick explains that the island represent critical nesting habitat and is one of the few patches in New York state where birds able to nest. After diseases like TB and typhoid were well contained, the hospital became a sanitarium for people who needed a respite from their difficult lives and before it was abandoned, open lawns and well-tended grounds surrounded the buildings. After 45 years of neglect, it have gone into hiding. Michael Feller shows the tennis courts that were colonized by plants. A layer of soil covers the old tennis court and has attacked the asphalt. Michael Feller explains a Norway maple that's growing around the post that held the tennis net with the seeds dropped in a crack around 1964 and growing since 44 years. The island vines is reaching inside the buildings with Michael Feller showing the porcelain berry in one of Riverside Hospital's large general wards where it can grow as much as a foot a day. Drug addicts were treated in the island's newest buildings during the 1950s and 60s with bizarre artwork hints at their tragic plight. Steven S. Ross shows the room where a screen keeping the addicts inside, a door that has a very narrow eye slot and very large deadbolt, and many graffiti's that have detail names, boroughs, places, and streets from all over New York including one graffiti saying "Help me, I'm being held here against my will." The breakdown of the building's defenses is most evident are the piles of plaster dust accumulated at the base of most of its walls. Plaster is the softest of the building materials and the first to go as the broken windows expose the interior to moisture revealing thick bricks that is used to isolate each room. The visitation of North Brother Island ends with Steven S. Ross saying that the building built for solitude and quiet has time subverted the original purpose by turning it as part of a cacophony of nature.

50 Years After People

On the Hawaiian Island of Oahu, the roads leading into Pearl Harbor from nearby Honolulu are overtaken by the jungle. Sam 'Ohu Gon explains in order to imagine what happens to the roads of Honolulu, it will have to take a look to the old Pali road, closed in 1960 and a vestige of the center line that the vegetation from the mountain encroached all the way to the point at the further down the road where both sides narrow the winding path remains between them.

65 Years After People

Even the toughest built relics of war have started to decay. Along the coast of France, silent guns, barbed wire and iron beach obstacles are succumbing to rust. It was already be seen at the imposing artillery of Pointe du Hoc, overlooking the infamous Normandy beaches in the time of humans.

Pointe du Hoc

Visiting Pointe du Hoc, it is part of the Atlantic Wall built by the Germans during World War II to keep the Allies out of Northern Europe and was pummeled by American forces during the massive D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944. Tanya Wattenburg Komas stated that the emplacement of Pointe du Hoc is considered a military failure in terms of its ability to withstand the invasion from the sea but from construction standpoint, it is a success due to the structures being extremely durable but starting to undergo on some deterioration.

Bunkers and gun emplacements along the Normandy Coast were built of concrete with steel reinforcing rods, but construction during wartime with the threat of imminent invasion have the Germans to inevitably cut corners. Seashells were often added added to the concrete mix and in some cases the concrete was not allowed enough time to cure before the bombs began to fall. The weaknesses left the bunkers vulnerable not just to bombs, but also corrosion. Tanya Wattenburg Komas explains that concrete typically deteriorates for a number of reasons including reactive soil and freeze-thaw cycles but the factors are not present at Pointe du Hoc, instead the main problem are steel-reinforcing itself. Moisture and salt in the air has entered the bunkers through pores and cracks in the concrete, causing the steel reinforcing bars to corrode, expand, and crack the surrounding concrete. Tanya Wattenburg Komas shows an example where steel corrodes, showing the concrete cracked and the resulting deterioration where expansive rust on the steel. She continues that it is very repairable but without people corrosion would continue causing failure of the structure. The Romans actually used concrete to build some of their monumental structures, long before the invention of steel reinforcing rods, making a seeming weakness an advantage. Tanya Wattenburg Komas explains that unreinforced concrete may survive longer like the Pantheon in Rome where 20 foot thick lower walls survived for nearly 2,000 years whereas at Pointe du Hoc contains reinforcing rods causing potential for steel corrosion that progress at a faster rate.

70 Years After People

In Pearl Harbor, the USS Missouri, once the pride of the U.S. fleet, is under a cover of green. The decks of the USS Missouri are consumed by a blanket of shrubs and grasses, vines creep up the topside structures and the massive 16-inch guns, and although its mooring line snapped long ago, the USS Missouri hasn't drifted far from its crumbling dock thanks to the mud of the shallow harbor bottom to kept the 45,000 ton behemoth close to shore. The Missouri is surprisingly deteriorating faster above the waterline than below, the show know it because of diving explorations done on the nearby ruin of the battleship USS Arizona, nearly 70 years after the battleship sank during the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor

After decades underwater, the exposed parts of the USS Arizona have become heavily rusted but below the waterline, the hull is preserved by an army of multi-colored sponges, feather worms, and corals. Matthew Russell explains that the encrustation covers the ship, protecting the ship from corrosion by slowing it down while it was present. While marine life forms a protective layer on the USS Arizona's steel hull, the ship's wooden deck is covered in layer of silt and sediment that offers its own protection. Matthew Russel explains that the wood-boring organism that normally deteriorated the deck have been kept out and the teak decks were preserved like it did on December 7, 1941 when the sailors were walking the decks. 70 years after it sank, it was estimated that the Arizona still held 500,000 gallons of oil, much of it trapped in the ship's fuel tanks and submerged compartments. Up to 9 quarts of oil leak from the ship everyday by continuing to drift to the surface like a slowly bleeding wound.

200 Years After People

In Denver, stripped of its defenses, the Wells Fargo Center has repeatedly unleashed avalanches onto the streets below, and the next avalanche is not snow but steel. Engineers at Colorado State University studied the many different ways skyscrapers can collapse in the time of humans. In the model shown, the heavy steel plates represent the floors of the building and the comparatively weak wooden dowels represent the weakened state of a corroded frame, if an upper story collapses, it cause a violent cascade. Richard Gutkowski stated that when the top floor of the building releases from the columns, its total weight moves due to gravity and by the time it hits the floor below, it has a force twice its own weight. He continues that the effect would increase as the floors go down and predict that the building as tall as the Wells Fargo Center would have the cascading effect in 200 years.

On the Colorado prairie outside of Denver, the descendants of domestic cattle have carved out a new way of life. Bruce Golden stated that the future cattle will be very different with it being smaller, more fleet, more agile, and able to escape from predators quite effectively. He continues it would take on a lot of characteristics like deer.

Even more striking are the herds of bison on the prairie. Before man nearly hunted them to near extinction, there were as many as 60 million roaming America. By the 21st century, the population had dwindled to 250,000. Supremely fit for the terrain, 200 years after people have allowed their numbers to explode, and the buffalo roam once again.

250 Years After People

In Pearl Harbor, the decks of the USS Missouri still rise above the waterline but water is penetrating the hull. Ronald Chavel shows at the waterline are the series of rivet heads, the weakest link in the ship. He continues that as they rust, it'll fail and water start entering inside of the tanks and start flooding the ship. As it takes on water, the ship sinks deeper into the mud of the harbor bottom where the ships deck remain 10 feet above water, allowing the elements to continue wearing away at its superstructure.

For how long the Missouri's hull remain intact, tests conducted on the nearby USS Arizona in 2008 and 2009 determined that its hull will take another 300 years to fully deteriorate. The USS Missouri, built nearly 30 years later, is well more advanced warship and with an outer hull 17 inches thick in places, engineers estimate that the ship could hold together for 20,000 years, making it a new home for generations of tropical fish. A wrecked warship serving as an artificial reef is not a new concept. In 2006, the U.S. Navy intentionally sank the retired aircraft carrier USS Oriskany off the coast of Florida where it took less than 45 minutes to slip beneath the waves. At roughly 900 feet long, it became one of the largest artificial reefs in the world and within a matter of months, it was teeming with ocean creatures including 38 species of fish. The Oriskany became known as The Great Carrier Reef.

Epilogue

Around the world, the armed and the defenseless soldier on. Some have shown resilience and others suffered from hidden weakness that have brought them to their knees. From the bottom of the sea, to the coastal bluffs, and desert flats, the battle quietly continues.

Transcript

Life After People Wiki has a transcript for this episode. To see it, click here.

Errors

• Although not mention in the episode, the first building that were built in North Brother Island was actually a lighthouse, built in 1869.

Trivia

• The episode returns to the normal font after the previous two episodes used a different font.
• Armed & Defenseless is the first episode to not have "after people" in the transition, that being 45 Years.
• It is also the first episode where the title is different from both American and British version, with "Armed & Defenseless" on the American while "Armed & Defenceless" on the British.
• It is also the first and only episode in Season 1 where the intro is uniquely different.
• The episode premiered 3 days after the 65th anniversary of D-Day.

Gallery

The title in the British version.

The thumbnail for the episode on History's Youtube Channel.

The thumbnail for the episode (some planes) as seen on History.com.

Even more planes, as seen on Hvault.

ARMED and DEFENSELESS - Pearl Harbor Falls Apart - Life After People (Season 1)

A clip of the episode beginning.