Drain Alcatraz (2017) Movie Script
NARRATOR: Alcatraz. The Rock.
The most infamous prison on earth.
JOHN CANTWELL: I think Alcatraz
was the perfect prison for the time.
It was "The Big Stick" against crime.
NARRATOR: America's worst,
Al Capone, Machine Guy Kelly
and Whitey Bulger,
were all locked up here.
The island was just over a mile offshore,
but escape was almost impossible.
Prisoners who tried
faced icy waters, deadly currents,
disorientating fog and fearsome predators.
To understand these dangerous forces,
a new investigation
will pull a plug on the seafloor
and drain the waters of San Francisco Bay.
It will reveal the secrets of the seabed
with stunning computer graphics.
Can the underwater landscape
explain the Rock's reputation
as an inescapable prison?
In 1962, three men
did break out from Alcatraz.
Will draining the bay throw new light
on what happened to them?
They entered the water at the north end
and took off in a raft,
never to be seen again.
NARRATOR: Did they reach
the mainland and freedom?
Or did the ferocious currents
shaped by the seabed seal their fate?
And can this underwater landscape
show why Alcatraz
might be the safest place
when the next earthquake hits California?
What secrets will be revealed
when we drain Alcatraz?
The island of Alcatraz sits alone
in the middle of San Francisco Bay...
a large body of water
on the west coast of the United States.
Within this dramatic landscape,
Alcatraz and the remnants
of the renowned US federal prison
are just over a mile
from the heart of the city.
For 29 years,
it held some of the most dangerous
and notorious criminals in history.
JOHN MARTINI:
Alcatraz was the end of the line
and that's what it was designed for.
It was the place where they could take
and isolate the troublemakers,
the gang leaders, the most problematic.
The most troublesome prisoners,
they sent them to Alcatraz.
NARRATOR: Officially,
no one successfully escaped the Rock.
But why exactly was no inmate
able to break out of Alcatraz?
To answer this,
we will use high-resolution sonar scans
to plot the hidden depths
of San Francisco Bay.
For the first time,
cutting-edge computer graphics
transform the scans
into remarkable images of the seabed.
This is Alcatraz as never seen before.
Today, the island is a museum
run by the National Park Service.
Over a million visit every year.
One man has watched it rise to become
one of America's most visited attractions.
Ranger John Cantwell.
He's worked on the island
for over 25 years.
He knows its history.
CANTWELL: There's a term that we use
on Alcatraz, "layers of history,"
and the first layer of history
would be the army's time on Alcatraz.
They arrive in 1853 and built a fortress
to protect the harbor.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons
take over in 1934,
and they ran the island for 29 years
as a super-max penitentiary.
NARRATOR: American justice reserved
Alcatraz for the worst of the worst.
The prison was fortified
to make sure they would stay put.
CANTWELL:
Where I'm standing is on Broadway.
This is the main corridor
in the cell house.
Alcatraz being a super-max penitentiary
meant that you had high security,
one officer for every three convicts.
They were constantly being watched.
Twelve times a day
they would have counted every convict
in this penitentiary building.
NARRATOR: Prison breaks
were suppressed with extreme force,
but escape was a constant temptation.
Freedom was just a short swim away.
The punishment of Alcatraz was this,
the view of what was going on
across the bay.
Everything is in plain view,
and these men that were incarcerated
on Alcatraz could see it.
I think it's fair to say every guy
that ever did time here
considered, "How are you gonna escape?"
NARRATOR: Liberty seemed so close
that for some it was irresistible.
The official count is
14 different escape attempts,
of that number,
five men are still unaccounted for.
NARRATOR: To make it off the island,
the convicts first had to escape
from the prison itself.
Well, probably, one of the most famous
escape attempts from the building
is the 1937 Roe and Cole escape attempt.
They cut through the windows
and pop out into the San Francisco Bay.
And they sent boats out looking
for those two guys and never found them.
The official on this
is that they were swept out to sea.
NARRATOR: Powerful currents weren't
the only dangers facing escapees.
Alcatraz folklore claimed that
predatory sharks swam in the Bay Area.
In 1959, a college student had been killed
by a great white in these waters
and in 2015 the Alcatraz shark legend
was confirmed on camera,
when tourists witnessed a great white
attacking a seal at the island's dock.
But fear of shark attacks
didn't stop the escape attempts.
And these were becoming easier as
the fabric of Alcatraz began to crumble.
MARTINI: The complex was aging.
Concrete starts to crack and spall,
steel rusts, barbed wire rusts.
It's almost impossible
to make an escape-proof prison.
NARRATOR:
In the last year before the prison closed,
there were two remarkable escape attempts.
In December 1962,
two men made it to the water.
CANTWELL: John Paul Scott and Darl Parker
escape from the basement
of the penitentiary building.
And they cut through two bars
in the basement window.
Pop out the window,
shimmy up a set of pipes,
scramble across the rooftop
of the cell house,
and basically came down
off the west wall of Alcatraz Island.
Scrambled down this road
and hit the water.
They found Darl Parker standing
on that rock, Little Alcatraz Island,
about 50 yards off the north end,
waving to the officer in the guard tower,
yelling, "Come get me."
But they found John Paul Scott
at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge.
NARRATOR: John Paul Scott
was officially the only prisoner
to successfully swim across the bay,
but he was so exhausted
when they found him
that he was quickly returned to Alcatraz.
There was one other escape attempt
in 1962,
the most famous in the prison's history.
Three convicts, Frank Morris,
and brothers, Clarence and John Anglin,
planned for months to escape
and eventually got off the island
on a homemade raft,
but they were never seen again.
The case is still alive.
The official record
is they're presumed drowned.
NARRATOR:
It's one of the great Alcatraz mysteries.
Could Morris and the Anglin brothers
have been the only ones
to make it to freedom?
Alcatraz closed in the spring of 1963.
Officially, no one escaped successfully.
But its true strength as a prison
can't be explained
just by the thickness of its walls.
Or the vigilance of its guards.
The waters around the Rock
were also a deadly barrier to escape.
Now science can explain just how
and why the bay was so dangerous.
Imagine if you could pull the plug
on the bottom of the bay
and drain the water from around Alcatraz.
For the first time, we can combine
high-definition sonar scans
and cutting-edge computer images
to show the hidden world of the seabed
and this remarkable landscape.
Finally, we have
an unobstructed view of Alcatraz.
It's a rock that rises
from San Francisco Bay.
It's isolated,
but it's highly visible from the shore.
Also, you can reach out and touch it,
but it's a mile-and-a-half away.
NARRATOR: Draining the bay reveals
Alcatraz as a pinnacle of bedrock
emerging from the seafloor.
It's surrounded by mountain peaks.
All of them are ancient survivors
from an age of earthquakes.
Tom Parsons is a geophysicist with
the United States Geographical Survey.
He has studied this area for decades.
TOM PARSONS:
So we're standing at the Golden Gate
and we're standing on mountains
that were formed 100 million years ago.
Now we're sandwiched right between
the San Andreas
and the parallel Hayward Fault,
both of which are helping
to accommodate plate motion here
between the Pacific
and North American plates.
NARRATOR: San Francisco sits right on
the edge of the North American Plate.
As the Pacific Plate grinds north past it,
stress builds up along
the major fault lines in the area,
the Hayward Fault
and most notably the San Andreas.
This region is very volatile.
It produces large earthquakes.
We've seen them in 1906, 1868.
Both were devastating earthquakes
in San Francisco.
NARRATOR: The nightmarish effects
of the 1906 earthquake,
7.9 on the Richter scale,
are a reminder
of how the area's violent geology
can threaten the existence
of a great city.
Over 100 million years ago,
the landscape here was entirely different.
There was a third plate between
the two larger ones called the Farallon.
TOM PARSONS: The Farallon Plate used to sit
between the Pacific
and North American Plates.
It was shoved underneath
the North American plate
over all that time.
NARRATOR:
The movement of the Farallon Plate
was the catalyst that created
San Francisco Bay and Alcatraz,
as it ground under
the North American Plate.
This process is called subduction.
As the Farallon Plate disappeared,
fragments of the Earth's crust
were forced upwards,
creating a valley and mountains.
Alcatraz was part of the coast range belt
that was uplifted by the subduction
of the Farallon Plate.
NARRATOR: The Bay Area
was then a long-forested valley
with a number of rocky mountains.
One of these mountains was Alcatraz.
Ten thousand years ago,
as the last ice age came to an end,
the area was deluged
by billions of gallons of melt water.
This created what we call
San Francisco Bay.
Alcatraz became an island.
This 1853 photograph
shows the tip of the drowned mountain
as a featureless rock
in the middle of the bay.
Alcatraz may look tranquil and isolated,
but it's surrounded
by powerful natural forces.
By draining the bay,
we can explain why the island
earned its deadly reputation,
and what may have happened during
the 1962 escape from Alcatraz.
NARRATOR: We're pulling the plug
on San Francisco Bay
and draining the waters
to discover why escaping from Alcatraz
was so dangerous.
[door slams]
Over three decades,
there were 14 daring escape attempts.
The story of one of these
has become legendary.
Probably the most famous escape attempt
would be the 1962 breakout.
NARRATOR: Frank Lee Morris
and brothers Charles and John Anglin
devised an audacious bid for freedom.
The escape attempt
was incredibly ingenious.
It involved stealing
an immense amount of material.
Dozens of rubber raincoats, glue,
electric motors to turn into drills.
The guys even made a periscope,
they made a flashlight.
NARRATOR: Now they had to use
these homemade tools
to breach the prison walls.
Light 'em.
We're in one
of the Anglin brothers' cells,
and they were ingenious
to actually create a portal
at the back of their cell.
And they fashioned a drill made out
of a vacuum cleaner engine,
put a diamond bit on the end of this thing
and then poked holes through the concrete
to loosen up the concrete
around the air vent.
Dummy heads
were made out of concrete material,
human hair glued onto the heads
and the faces painted on these heads.
And at night with the lights down,
it looked like they were sleeping
in their cells.
So in the cell house,
the lights go out at 9:30.
That's basically
when they make their break.
Once the lights are out,
the heads are in place,
they go up to the rooftop
and they've got from 9:30
to 6:30 the next morning
to make it to the mainland.
NARRATOR: With over 50
rubber raincoats glued together,
the escapees made a makeshift raft
and life vests.
It was their lifeline to freedom.
They carried everything to the roof
and dragged it down to the water's edge.
So this is the actual spot
where they entered the water.
Frank Lee Morris and the Anglin brothers
came down this hillside.
They dragged their raft,
inflated it at the seawall here,
jumped in and took off into the night.
They searched the waters
looking for these three men,
and the raft or the men were never found.
NARRATOR: The official FBI documents
state the three men and their raft
were most likely swept out to sea.
Their bodies were never recovered.
But is this what really happened?
Were they lost at sea?
Or could they have made it
to the mainland?
To understand the fate
of the three escapees on their raft,
scientists are studying
the geology of the bay itself.
Can the seabed offer an answer?
First, Patrick Barnard
from the United States Geological Survey
will explore the underwater landscape
at the mouth of San Francisco Bay.
He's hoping analysis of the seabed
will explain the powerful currents
that surge around Alcatraz,
making escape attempts so dangerous.
Today we're going to be mapping
from the Golden Gate Bridge, west,
toward the outer coast.
So, it'd be very interesting to see
what's on the seafloor in that area.
NARRATOR: It's the first time
that high-tech multi-beam scanners
have been used
to explore how the seabed itself
may have shaped the prisoners' fate.
The incredible thing about multi-beam
is it captures the seafloor
in high-resolution
so we get a sounding at least
every one meter along the seafloor,
so we can see in incredible detail
what the seafloor looks like.
NARRATOR: This remarkable technology
projects thousands of sound waves
towards the seabed.
The waves reflect off the contours,
giving the team
an unprecedented view of the bottom.
They begin their investigation under
the most iconic location in San Francisco.
We're right underneath
the Golden Gate Bridge
at the narrowest part
of the Golden Gate Strait.
The purple represents
the deeper parts of the channel,
which are about 92 meters deep
in this location.
NARRATOR: After several passes
over the deep channel,
the monitor shows
a strange landscape below.
We're seeing a largely featureless bottom.
This whole center portion of the swath
is scoured clean to bedrock.
NARRATOR: Draining the water
from under the Golden Gate Bridge
reveals a huge gorge.
It's far deeper than the rest of the bay.
Large enough to hide a 30-story building.
But what happens to the seabed
when the multi-beam vessel
heads west to the open ocean?
We're located a little over a kilometer
from the Golden Gate Bridge now
to the west,
but the bottom is still clean,
it's still bedrock lined.
NARRATOR:
As the boat moves further from the bridge,
the water grows much shallower.
The sonar readings suggest a dramatic
transformation in the seascape below.
The bottom is changing. We're seeing
a lot more sediment on the seafloor now.
NARRATOR: Draining the water
reveals an incredible sight.
We're starting to see
some very large sand waves here
that are emerging from the depths
of the Golden Gate Strait.
NARRATOR:
These formations on the seabed are huge.
So the largest sand waves are
about 200 meters long, six meters high,
the biggest ones ten meters high
or about three stories.
NARRATOR: And they're sitting
just yards away from the harbor entrance.
They look like probably
what the Sahara would look like
if you were walking through it.
NARRATOR: These giant sand waves
are caused by the huge tidal rush
through the Golden Gate Strait.
The fast-moving water picks up sand
and then dumps it as it slows down.
The sand waves at the mouth
of San Francisco Bay are there
because you have this very large estuary
and all the tidal flow associated with it,
roughly two trillion liters of water
being forced through on every tide.
NARRATOR: Huge tidal forces
push water through the narrow channel.
The solid bedrock of the gorge
does not erode.
So, the strait acts like a fire hose
as the water rushes through it.
And the flow is 160 times greater
than the volume of water
cascading over Niagara Falls.
You have all this sand and gravel
being carried along
and forced through this narrow opening
and then as the opening widens
further and further,
all this material gets deposited
in these bedforms.
NARRATOR: The drained landscape
shows how the geology of the seabed
shapes the powerful tidal currents
in San Francisco Bay.
First, the deep gorge that funnels
the water into a jet stream.
Moving west, beyond the bridge,
we follow the seabed
as it rises from over 300 feet deep
to just 130 feet.
The drain shows how the racing current
dumps thousands of tons of sand,
creating these giant sand waves
up to 30 feet high.
But what does this underwater landscape
of the Golden Gate
have to do with escaping from Alcatraz?
These racing tides are what
the inmates had to contend with
when fleeing the Rock.
Is it possible that Frank Morris
and the Anglin brothers
got caught in these wicked currents?
The records
from the 1962 FBI investigation
show the tide charts on June 11th.
From 9:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m.,
there was a strong outgoing tide,
which peaked at exactly 11:46 p.m.
So, when did the three escapees
hit the water in their homemade raft?
MARTINI: From the moment lights out
happened, which I think was 9:30,
as soon as they could've,
they would've gotten out of their cells,
give it an hour, hour-and-a-half to have
gotten everything that they needed to
through that vent on the roof,
across the cell house,
down the other side, hit the water.
I think that they started paddling
as soon as they got to the water.
Let's say 11:00.
NARRATOR: The three convicts
would have been in the water
at peak tidal flow
during an ebbing, outgoing tide.
What were their chances if their
flimsy raft made of raincoats broke up,
leaving them to swim
in the powerful currents?
BARNARD: If you tried to escape
off the north end of the island,
especially during ebbing tide
like they did in 1962,
where the currents are extremely strong
and moving straight out to sea,
it would have been very difficult
to swim out of that current.
Within an hour-and-a-half,
you could've been on the open coast.
NARRATOR:
So Morris and the Anglin brothers
had to struggle with the fastest
and deadliest current flow in the bay.
And these currents show no mercy.
They have been known to destroy vessels
far larger than a raft
San Francisco Bay is a ships' graveyard.
NARRATOR: Draining San Francisco Bay
reveals a deep, ominous gorge
under the Golden Gate Bridge
and giant sand waves
rising from the seabed,
evidence of massive water flow
through the mouth of the bay.
Two-and-a-half miles to the east
of the Golden Gate lies Alcatraz.
CANTWELL: This is a great example
of the tidal movement
around Alcatraz Island.
I'd gauge this at about a five-knot tide.
NARRATOR: It is possible to swim
from Alcatraz to the mainland,
but only during the brief period
when the tides are turning
and the currents slow down.
I've done this swim on a slack tide,
and there's no way
that you'd catch me in this water
trying to make it to San Francisco.
NARRATOR: Fierce currents were just
one of the challenges inmates faced
when they tried to escape.
There were other deadly hazards.
Bill Baker is one of the few
surviving inmates from Alcatraz.
A convict, he was sent to the Rock
for three years in 1957
after attempting to break out
from other prisons.
But escaping Alcatraz was another matter.
I thought about it a lot, but I couldn't
figure out how to beat the water,
because the water kills you
because it's cold.
That water is the wall that kept us here,
and it killed a lot of people
trying to escape,
and so that becomes very ugly,
you know, after you look at it a while.
NARRATOR: The frigid water
that frightened Bill Baker
is caused by the upwelling
of cold currents from the deep ocean.
These replace the warmer surface waters
relentlessly churned up
by the strong winds of San Francisco Bay.
Average temperatures range from
a bone-chilling 51
to 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
In these conditions, hypothermia
would quickly overwhelm any swimmer.
But when this cold water
is mixed with warm air,
it creates another killer
that silently invades the bay.
Fog.
Thick fog could be a prisoner's friend,
concealing a breakout from Alcatraz.
In 1937, two men escape from
the industries building into the fog.
They basically timed it
between the head counts.
They had about a 45-minute jump
on the officers
before they realized
that they were missing.
NARRATOR: For Ralph Roe and Ted Cole,
the fog offered cover
once they were off the island.
But the whiteout also posed a threat.
JAN NULL: If someone were to escape
into the foggy bay,
it would be almost
an impossible type of situation.
It'd be very dangerous,
it'd be disorienting.
So that would be almost
a worst-case type of scenario
for someone to try and escape in.
NARRATOR: Jan Null knows all about fog.
He has been a local
San Francisco meteorologist for years.
But why is fog so prevalent
in this part of the world?
The mechanism that creates
the classic fog for San Francisco is,
you know, a sea breeze circulation.
As that air flows over the very cold water
along the California coast,
it condenses out,
forms the marine layer, fog,
and then that spreads inland.
NARRATOR: There is only one place
for fog to reach San Francisco.
The only sea-level gap for that fog
to get through is the Golden Gate,
so that's the area
that's going to get the most fog.
It's focused, you know, from the gate
right toward Alcatraz
and then on toward Berkeley.
NARRATOR: When Roe and Cole escaped,
they quickly vanished into the whiteout.
MARTINI: It was December, it was cold.
One eyewitness, he saw them.
He claims to have seen them
in the water being swept out.
99.9% sure they didn't make it.
NARRATOR:
The thick fog made rescue impossible.
Roe and Cole were never seen again.
The FBI speculated
they had died in the icy water.
The San Francisco Bay fog mixed
with the wicked fast-moving currents
is a recipe for disaster.
By draining the water, we can see
the results of this deadly combination.
There are ghostly, large artifacts
scattered on the seabed.
Dozens of shipwrecks.
San Francisco Bay
is a graveyard of lost ships.
And there is one,
just east of the Golden Gate Bridge,
deep down on the side of the gorge,
that has a tragic tale to tell.
The shipwreck is the City of Chester.
But how did it get here?
August, 1888.
The City of Chester was moving
towards the Golden Gate Strait.
August is a time when you get
heavy fogs around here.
And it was foggy,
she's heading out the Golden Gate,
at the time when a great ocean liner
is heading in.
It was far larger, far faster.
NARRATOR: Now, 130 years later,
National Park historian Steve Haller
and archaeologist Peter Gavette
are searching for the lost vessel.
The City of Chester went down rapidly
and she sank in 200 or so feet of water.
We're over the spot where she lays.
NARRATOR: Multi-beam sonar
gives a tantalizing glimpse
of the sunken vessel.
You can see the superstructure.
GAVETTE: That's the stern there.
The fact that the City of Chester hasn't
been covered with sediment is great.
With the multi-beam data,
we can look at the City of Chester wreck
as it happened.
NARRATOR: Using the data from the scan,
we can now drain the wreck
of the City of Chester.
Does it offer any evidence
of how the disaster unfolded?
You can see exactly where
the fatal damage to the ship occurred
and you can see how that bow section
is off kilter with the rest of the ship,
so it broke her keel.
NARRATOR:
The drained ship is the crime scene,
giving clear evidence of its fate.
We can actually see where it was struck
just aft of the port side,
just aft of the bow
and almost split it in two.
NARRATOR: In the thick fog,
the City of Chester
and the White Star Liner Oceanic
were on a collision course.
They did not see each other
until far too late.
Powerful currents drove them together.
The City of Chester heals off to port,
the Oceanic hits her in the side,
far heavier vessel, splits her hull.
NARRATOR:
The smaller ship was fatally wounded.
The City of Chester sank in six minutes,
killing 16 people on board.
She is just one of many shipwrecks that
lie on the bottom of San Francisco Bay,
the deadly result
of extreme natural forces
that make this bay so dangerous.
These are the same forces that escapees
from Alcatraz had to contend with.
Most notably,
Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers,
who escaped the island prison
on June 11th, 1962.
What would their chances have been
in these conditions?
If you consider
that two ocean-going steamers
can get tossed around to the point
where one cuts the other one in half,
what are the odds of three guys
in a rapidly deflating,
homemade rubber raft gonna have?
NARRATOR:
But could the powerful currents in the bay
have instead helped the escapees?
Could they have been pushed to shore,
and to freedom?
In 1962, three prisoners launched
a legendary escape from Alcatraz
in a homemade raft.
Ever since, there have been wildly
different rumors about their fate.
Some claim to have seen them
on the mainland.
But that conflicts
with the official FBI report,
which states that their objective
was Angel Island,
a two-mile paddle north of Alcatraz.
MARTINI:
They did what nobody else ever did.
They got off the island with a head start,
and were never seen again.
CANTWELL:
The official Bureau of Prisons report
on these three men in the raft
is that the raft took on water,
the men were in the San Francisco Bay,
they became hypothermic and the currents
took them out to the Pacific.
NARRATOR: But this was never proved.
And when the story broke around the world,
there was excitement and intrigue.
NEWSCASTER: It appears to be
the first successful escape
in the history
of the maximum-security prison.
NARRATOR:
For weeks, the FBI searched the bay.
Their goal was to find them dead or alive.
NEWSCASTER:
The escape triggered the greatest manhunt
in San Francisco's history.
NARRATOR: Though they never discovered
any trace of the bodies,
the FBI did find evidence of the escape.
They recovered two
of the inflatable life vests.
They recovered two of the plywood paddles
found floating
in different places in the bay.
Another one of the life vests
was recovered outside the Golden Gate
at a beach north of the Golden Gate.
There was no lack of evidence
that they escaped.
NARRATOR: This evidence was scattered
all over the Bay Area,
with no signs of the men.
How did this happen?
Could the three fugitives have made it?
Is there a possibility that the strong
currents worked in the escapees' favor
by pushing them to the shore?
Patrick Barnard
and USGS colleague Josh Logan
will explore this intriguing theory.
They will use high-tech buoys
with GPS sensors to track the currents.
BARNARD: The conditions are very similar
to what they would have been
during the escape in 1962.
We're at peak ebb flow.
The water is moving
about a meter-and-a-half a second,
or about five-and-a-half kilometers
per hour.
LOGAN: The GPS will be recording
its position every five seconds.
We'll be able to pick that up
on our laptop
and be able to track it in real time.
And that'll let us know the direction
and the speed that the water's moving.
Okay, so we are tracking now.
I'm going to deploy the drifter.
NARRATOR: The buoy is dropped
at the north end of Alcatraz
on the escapees' route to Angel Island.
At first the buoy's path
seems to confirm the theory
that the men were swept out to sea.
LOGAN: It's drifting about, averaging
about six kilometers an hour right now.
In 15 minutes we've drifted
about half the distance
between Alcatraz and the Golden Gate.
It looks like it is going right down
the middle of the Golden Gate Strait.
NARRATOR: Even in a strong headwind,
the fast-moving current
is taking the buoy out to sea.
But then, the unexpected happens.
It was going about six kilometers
an hour until it hit that seam
and then it slowed down
to one kilometer an hour.
NARRATOR: The buoy has stopped
just before the Golden Gate Bridge.
It's not what the team predicted.
All right, it looks like it just sort of
slowed down because it got into an eddy.
That's pretty interesting.
So you can see it was traveling
southwest in a straight line
until it hit that eddy and then it
slowed down and changed directions.
NARRATOR: An eddy is created
by water moving in a circular motion,
almost like a slow-moving whirlpool.
Can draining the water
from San Francisco Bay
reveal anything that would cause
such a giant eddy?
Just east of the bridge
there is a strange feature on the seabed.
BARNARD: Right toward the Golden Gate,
there's some very shallow depths
from a large bedrock outcrop,
known as a sill, in this location,
and so this causes an uprush
of a lot of water
and eventually some flow separation,
causing this eddy.
NARRATOR: The deep-water currents
run directly into this bedrock sill,
forcing the fast-flowing water
to the surface.
This creates the giant eddy which has
stopped the buoy dead in its track.
Draining San Francisco Bay is revealing
how powerful currents on the surface
that swept men to their deaths
are shaped by the contours below.
There are other strange features on the
seabed which explain the deadly outcome
of an earlier escape attempt.
Convicted burglar Aaron Burgett made
a break for freedom in September 1958.
His friend, Bill Baker,
was an inmate at the time.
Well, he was a young man. He was, like I
say, he was strong and he was, you know,
strong as a mule.
NARRATOR: While on garbage detail,
Burgett overcame a guard
and then jumped into the waters
off the west side of Alcatraz.
They didn't know what happened
to Burgett and they locked us all down.
There were boats circling the island
all day and night, you know,
with searchlights and everything.
Every day that passed, we were
more optimistic that he was gone.
NARRATOR:
Though the prisoners hoped he made it,
two weeks later
the authorities found Burgett.
But then one day his body washed up
and then that was the end of that.
I was very sad about that because
I hoped like heck that he made it.
NARRATOR:
Strangely, Burgett's body was found
just yards off the shores of Alcatraz.
So why wasn't he washed out to sea
by the powerful currents in the bay?
The clues may lie in the shallow waters
around Alcatraz.
They've never
been accurately mapped before.
Now Professor Rikk Kvitek from
California State University, Monterey,
will use a one-of-a-kind surveying vessel
to explore the terrain.
It's designed to work in all the places
a conventional vessel can't go.
It can work in shallow water around rocks
and it's outfitted
with all the sonar systems
found on a normal hydrographic vessel
except it's all operated by one.
NARRATOR:
After a day of scanning the shallows,
back and forth along the western cliffs,
Professor Kvitek's survey helps explain
what happened to Aaron Burgett's body.
The drained seabed around Alcatraz shows
dozens of large rocks and crevices.
When Burgett drowned,
his body probably sank to the bottom
and became trapped in these rocks.
Later, as it decomposed,
gases forming in the corpse
would have lifted it to the surface.
The 1962 escapees
didn't try to swim to freedom.
They used a homemade raft.
But where they ended up,
lost out at sea, or safe on the mainland,
is the real mystery.
NARRATOR: Patrick Barnard and Josh Logan
are hoping to confirm
how the seabed in San Francisco Bay
influences the water currents above.
They want to determine the course
the escaping prisoners took in 1962.
The first test buoy stopped dead
in a giant eddy.
They now deploy two other buoys
in different locations
along the route to Angel Island.
Ah, we're going to release it
a little bit further north
from where we released the last drifter.
NARRATOR: The two buoys begin
their journey towards the Golden Gate.
The second moves down
into the same eddy as the first,
but the third buoy
heads directly towards the Bridge.
This one seems to be heading out the gate
instead of getting caught in that eddy
that we saw further to the south.
NARRATOR:
Moments later, it's past the bridge.
So that third buoy is basically gone
straight out the main channel
and has sped up.
NARRATOR: The drained seabed
shows exactly why
this buoy is moving southwest.
As it floats slightly further north,
it moves past the bedrock sill
and misses the eddy.
Then powerful currents sweep it
through the gorge
and under the Golden Gate Bridge.
Soon, the buoy is in the open ocean.
We deployed it for about an hour
and it went 6.8 kilometers
at a maximum speed
of ten kilometers an hour.
It's about in line
with the predictions of the model.
I was surprised
the first two didn't make it out.
But they got caught in these eddies.
And this one was going pretty much
right as the model predicted
peaking at ten kilometers per hour,
which is far faster than anybody can swim.
NARRATOR: Getting caught in the eddies
may not have saved the escapees.
They had to fight against powerful
currents to get to the mainland.
Anybody that's trying to paddle to shore,
they'd be heading southwest
and they'd probably be going sideways.
NARRATOR: The buoy test
throws fascinating new light
on the 1962 FBI report.
The two buoys caught in the eddy
moved in different directions
including one that amazingly
floated back towards Alcatraz.
This could explain
why debris from the prisoners' raft
was found near the island
after the escape.
The path of the third buoy
shows that if the prisoners drowned,
as the FBI believed,
their heavy bodies
could have been swept out to sea
by the ferocious currents.
But the test truly shows one thing--
San Francisco Bay is unpredictable.
BARNARD: The current field is so complex
that you could have literally just been
just a few meters on either side
of the main part of the channel
and you could have ended up
in completely different places.
You could end up ten kilometers out to sea
or almost right back at Alcatraz.
NARRATOR: But for the three inmates,
if they did reach the open ocean,
there was one more deadly challenge.
Because of its high population
of great white sharks,
this area is known as the Red Triangle.
In June of '62, it would have also been
during upwelling season like it is now.
BARNARD: So, you have lots of nutrients
in the water column.
Lots of fish
and lots of bigger predators, so...
it's likely there could have been more
great whites in the area than there are
during the rest of the year.
NARRATOR: So if they made it
this far out, dead or alive,
they may have become prey
for the great whites.
The bodies of the three inmates
were never found.
But now science shows that it is unlikely
that they could have survived.
The infamous prison closed its doors
in 1963 with a perfect record.
Officially, there were no successful
escapes from Alcatraz,
though many tried.
The conditions surrounding this island
is what really made it
an escape-proof prison.
MARTINI: The bay was the most
formidable of the prison's walls.
You could say that the bay
has really created Alcatraz's reputation.
NARRATOR: The "perfect prison" was
the result of extraordinary geology.
Deep gorges, giant underwater sand dunes,
hard bedrock pillars
at the Golden Gate Strait,
powerful currents and even great predators
that roam the waters outside the bay.
All natural phenomena
that made the Rock inescapable.
But there is another mighty natural force
at work in San Francisco Bay
that dwarfs even the power
of the ocean currents.
A drained Pacific Ocean
reveals the first clue.
Deep under the waters
off the coast of San Francisco
lies the infamous San Andreas Fault.
The shifting tectonic plates have
caused major earthquakes in the past,
the most-deadly in 1906.
Over 3,000 people lost their lives.
But could an even deadlier earthquake
hit the area?
The so called "Big One."
So in our forecast
we actually consider an earthquake
that could start at the southernmost part
of the San Andreas Fault,
run all the way along through the Bay Area
up north, involves the entire
San Andreas Fault zone.
That earthquake would be on
the scale of 8.2 to 8.4 in magnitude.
NARRATOR:
The devastation would be far greater
than the destruction
caused by the 1989 quake.
TOM PARSONS: If we were to see an earthquake
of that scale in San Francisco,
that would cause, unfortunately,
a lot of casualties.
Many buildings would collapse.
Freeways and infrastructure-type things
would be in danger.
If it did happen, I think we would see
significant destruction in the city
and throughout the Bay Area
and throughout California.
NARRATOR: The massive earthquake
could cause parts of the city
to topple into the sea,
much of the downtown core destroyed.
The Golden Gate Bridge
pushed to its engineering limits.
But when the fire and smoke clears,
one place will still be standing.
TOM PARSONS: During a big earthquake,
Alcatraz would be a safe haven
'cause it is built
out of very strong rock.
It's not going to collapse under
strong shaking like soft soil would.
It's been there for 100 million years,
it's hung in there.
So it's gonna do well
during an earthquake.
MARTINI: If the geologists are correct,
and when the San Andreas lets go,
Alcatraz is the safest place to be.
That is the ultimate irony.
The island that so many men
wanted to get away from
is the place that's gonna offer
the refuge.
NARRATOR: By draining Alcatraz
and exposing the secrets
hidden on the seabed,
a different picture of the island emerges.
The explanations
behind its most legendary mysteries
involve more than just the prison itself.
The geography of San Francisco Bay,
the waters, the rocks,
the wind and the fog,
a tightly woven net
making Alcatraz an inescapable place.
Unless the "Big One" hits.
By draining the waters around Alcatraz,
the secrets of the Rock
have been revealed.
Captioned by
Pixel Logic Media
The most infamous prison on earth.
JOHN CANTWELL: I think Alcatraz
was the perfect prison for the time.
It was "The Big Stick" against crime.
NARRATOR: America's worst,
Al Capone, Machine Guy Kelly
and Whitey Bulger,
were all locked up here.
The island was just over a mile offshore,
but escape was almost impossible.
Prisoners who tried
faced icy waters, deadly currents,
disorientating fog and fearsome predators.
To understand these dangerous forces,
a new investigation
will pull a plug on the seafloor
and drain the waters of San Francisco Bay.
It will reveal the secrets of the seabed
with stunning computer graphics.
Can the underwater landscape
explain the Rock's reputation
as an inescapable prison?
In 1962, three men
did break out from Alcatraz.
Will draining the bay throw new light
on what happened to them?
They entered the water at the north end
and took off in a raft,
never to be seen again.
NARRATOR: Did they reach
the mainland and freedom?
Or did the ferocious currents
shaped by the seabed seal their fate?
And can this underwater landscape
show why Alcatraz
might be the safest place
when the next earthquake hits California?
What secrets will be revealed
when we drain Alcatraz?
The island of Alcatraz sits alone
in the middle of San Francisco Bay...
a large body of water
on the west coast of the United States.
Within this dramatic landscape,
Alcatraz and the remnants
of the renowned US federal prison
are just over a mile
from the heart of the city.
For 29 years,
it held some of the most dangerous
and notorious criminals in history.
JOHN MARTINI:
Alcatraz was the end of the line
and that's what it was designed for.
It was the place where they could take
and isolate the troublemakers,
the gang leaders, the most problematic.
The most troublesome prisoners,
they sent them to Alcatraz.
NARRATOR: Officially,
no one successfully escaped the Rock.
But why exactly was no inmate
able to break out of Alcatraz?
To answer this,
we will use high-resolution sonar scans
to plot the hidden depths
of San Francisco Bay.
For the first time,
cutting-edge computer graphics
transform the scans
into remarkable images of the seabed.
This is Alcatraz as never seen before.
Today, the island is a museum
run by the National Park Service.
Over a million visit every year.
One man has watched it rise to become
one of America's most visited attractions.
Ranger John Cantwell.
He's worked on the island
for over 25 years.
He knows its history.
CANTWELL: There's a term that we use
on Alcatraz, "layers of history,"
and the first layer of history
would be the army's time on Alcatraz.
They arrive in 1853 and built a fortress
to protect the harbor.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons
take over in 1934,
and they ran the island for 29 years
as a super-max penitentiary.
NARRATOR: American justice reserved
Alcatraz for the worst of the worst.
The prison was fortified
to make sure they would stay put.
CANTWELL:
Where I'm standing is on Broadway.
This is the main corridor
in the cell house.
Alcatraz being a super-max penitentiary
meant that you had high security,
one officer for every three convicts.
They were constantly being watched.
Twelve times a day
they would have counted every convict
in this penitentiary building.
NARRATOR: Prison breaks
were suppressed with extreme force,
but escape was a constant temptation.
Freedom was just a short swim away.
The punishment of Alcatraz was this,
the view of what was going on
across the bay.
Everything is in plain view,
and these men that were incarcerated
on Alcatraz could see it.
I think it's fair to say every guy
that ever did time here
considered, "How are you gonna escape?"
NARRATOR: Liberty seemed so close
that for some it was irresistible.
The official count is
14 different escape attempts,
of that number,
five men are still unaccounted for.
NARRATOR: To make it off the island,
the convicts first had to escape
from the prison itself.
Well, probably, one of the most famous
escape attempts from the building
is the 1937 Roe and Cole escape attempt.
They cut through the windows
and pop out into the San Francisco Bay.
And they sent boats out looking
for those two guys and never found them.
The official on this
is that they were swept out to sea.
NARRATOR: Powerful currents weren't
the only dangers facing escapees.
Alcatraz folklore claimed that
predatory sharks swam in the Bay Area.
In 1959, a college student had been killed
by a great white in these waters
and in 2015 the Alcatraz shark legend
was confirmed on camera,
when tourists witnessed a great white
attacking a seal at the island's dock.
But fear of shark attacks
didn't stop the escape attempts.
And these were becoming easier as
the fabric of Alcatraz began to crumble.
MARTINI: The complex was aging.
Concrete starts to crack and spall,
steel rusts, barbed wire rusts.
It's almost impossible
to make an escape-proof prison.
NARRATOR:
In the last year before the prison closed,
there were two remarkable escape attempts.
In December 1962,
two men made it to the water.
CANTWELL: John Paul Scott and Darl Parker
escape from the basement
of the penitentiary building.
And they cut through two bars
in the basement window.
Pop out the window,
shimmy up a set of pipes,
scramble across the rooftop
of the cell house,
and basically came down
off the west wall of Alcatraz Island.
Scrambled down this road
and hit the water.
They found Darl Parker standing
on that rock, Little Alcatraz Island,
about 50 yards off the north end,
waving to the officer in the guard tower,
yelling, "Come get me."
But they found John Paul Scott
at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge.
NARRATOR: John Paul Scott
was officially the only prisoner
to successfully swim across the bay,
but he was so exhausted
when they found him
that he was quickly returned to Alcatraz.
There was one other escape attempt
in 1962,
the most famous in the prison's history.
Three convicts, Frank Morris,
and brothers, Clarence and John Anglin,
planned for months to escape
and eventually got off the island
on a homemade raft,
but they were never seen again.
The case is still alive.
The official record
is they're presumed drowned.
NARRATOR:
It's one of the great Alcatraz mysteries.
Could Morris and the Anglin brothers
have been the only ones
to make it to freedom?
Alcatraz closed in the spring of 1963.
Officially, no one escaped successfully.
But its true strength as a prison
can't be explained
just by the thickness of its walls.
Or the vigilance of its guards.
The waters around the Rock
were also a deadly barrier to escape.
Now science can explain just how
and why the bay was so dangerous.
Imagine if you could pull the plug
on the bottom of the bay
and drain the water from around Alcatraz.
For the first time, we can combine
high-definition sonar scans
and cutting-edge computer images
to show the hidden world of the seabed
and this remarkable landscape.
Finally, we have
an unobstructed view of Alcatraz.
It's a rock that rises
from San Francisco Bay.
It's isolated,
but it's highly visible from the shore.
Also, you can reach out and touch it,
but it's a mile-and-a-half away.
NARRATOR: Draining the bay reveals
Alcatraz as a pinnacle of bedrock
emerging from the seafloor.
It's surrounded by mountain peaks.
All of them are ancient survivors
from an age of earthquakes.
Tom Parsons is a geophysicist with
the United States Geographical Survey.
He has studied this area for decades.
TOM PARSONS:
So we're standing at the Golden Gate
and we're standing on mountains
that were formed 100 million years ago.
Now we're sandwiched right between
the San Andreas
and the parallel Hayward Fault,
both of which are helping
to accommodate plate motion here
between the Pacific
and North American plates.
NARRATOR: San Francisco sits right on
the edge of the North American Plate.
As the Pacific Plate grinds north past it,
stress builds up along
the major fault lines in the area,
the Hayward Fault
and most notably the San Andreas.
This region is very volatile.
It produces large earthquakes.
We've seen them in 1906, 1868.
Both were devastating earthquakes
in San Francisco.
NARRATOR: The nightmarish effects
of the 1906 earthquake,
7.9 on the Richter scale,
are a reminder
of how the area's violent geology
can threaten the existence
of a great city.
Over 100 million years ago,
the landscape here was entirely different.
There was a third plate between
the two larger ones called the Farallon.
TOM PARSONS: The Farallon Plate used to sit
between the Pacific
and North American Plates.
It was shoved underneath
the North American plate
over all that time.
NARRATOR:
The movement of the Farallon Plate
was the catalyst that created
San Francisco Bay and Alcatraz,
as it ground under
the North American Plate.
This process is called subduction.
As the Farallon Plate disappeared,
fragments of the Earth's crust
were forced upwards,
creating a valley and mountains.
Alcatraz was part of the coast range belt
that was uplifted by the subduction
of the Farallon Plate.
NARRATOR: The Bay Area
was then a long-forested valley
with a number of rocky mountains.
One of these mountains was Alcatraz.
Ten thousand years ago,
as the last ice age came to an end,
the area was deluged
by billions of gallons of melt water.
This created what we call
San Francisco Bay.
Alcatraz became an island.
This 1853 photograph
shows the tip of the drowned mountain
as a featureless rock
in the middle of the bay.
Alcatraz may look tranquil and isolated,
but it's surrounded
by powerful natural forces.
By draining the bay,
we can explain why the island
earned its deadly reputation,
and what may have happened during
the 1962 escape from Alcatraz.
NARRATOR: We're pulling the plug
on San Francisco Bay
and draining the waters
to discover why escaping from Alcatraz
was so dangerous.
[door slams]
Over three decades,
there were 14 daring escape attempts.
The story of one of these
has become legendary.
Probably the most famous escape attempt
would be the 1962 breakout.
NARRATOR: Frank Lee Morris
and brothers Charles and John Anglin
devised an audacious bid for freedom.
The escape attempt
was incredibly ingenious.
It involved stealing
an immense amount of material.
Dozens of rubber raincoats, glue,
electric motors to turn into drills.
The guys even made a periscope,
they made a flashlight.
NARRATOR: Now they had to use
these homemade tools
to breach the prison walls.
Light 'em.
We're in one
of the Anglin brothers' cells,
and they were ingenious
to actually create a portal
at the back of their cell.
And they fashioned a drill made out
of a vacuum cleaner engine,
put a diamond bit on the end of this thing
and then poked holes through the concrete
to loosen up the concrete
around the air vent.
Dummy heads
were made out of concrete material,
human hair glued onto the heads
and the faces painted on these heads.
And at night with the lights down,
it looked like they were sleeping
in their cells.
So in the cell house,
the lights go out at 9:30.
That's basically
when they make their break.
Once the lights are out,
the heads are in place,
they go up to the rooftop
and they've got from 9:30
to 6:30 the next morning
to make it to the mainland.
NARRATOR: With over 50
rubber raincoats glued together,
the escapees made a makeshift raft
and life vests.
It was their lifeline to freedom.
They carried everything to the roof
and dragged it down to the water's edge.
So this is the actual spot
where they entered the water.
Frank Lee Morris and the Anglin brothers
came down this hillside.
They dragged their raft,
inflated it at the seawall here,
jumped in and took off into the night.
They searched the waters
looking for these three men,
and the raft or the men were never found.
NARRATOR: The official FBI documents
state the three men and their raft
were most likely swept out to sea.
Their bodies were never recovered.
But is this what really happened?
Were they lost at sea?
Or could they have made it
to the mainland?
To understand the fate
of the three escapees on their raft,
scientists are studying
the geology of the bay itself.
Can the seabed offer an answer?
First, Patrick Barnard
from the United States Geological Survey
will explore the underwater landscape
at the mouth of San Francisco Bay.
He's hoping analysis of the seabed
will explain the powerful currents
that surge around Alcatraz,
making escape attempts so dangerous.
Today we're going to be mapping
from the Golden Gate Bridge, west,
toward the outer coast.
So, it'd be very interesting to see
what's on the seafloor in that area.
NARRATOR: It's the first time
that high-tech multi-beam scanners
have been used
to explore how the seabed itself
may have shaped the prisoners' fate.
The incredible thing about multi-beam
is it captures the seafloor
in high-resolution
so we get a sounding at least
every one meter along the seafloor,
so we can see in incredible detail
what the seafloor looks like.
NARRATOR: This remarkable technology
projects thousands of sound waves
towards the seabed.
The waves reflect off the contours,
giving the team
an unprecedented view of the bottom.
They begin their investigation under
the most iconic location in San Francisco.
We're right underneath
the Golden Gate Bridge
at the narrowest part
of the Golden Gate Strait.
The purple represents
the deeper parts of the channel,
which are about 92 meters deep
in this location.
NARRATOR: After several passes
over the deep channel,
the monitor shows
a strange landscape below.
We're seeing a largely featureless bottom.
This whole center portion of the swath
is scoured clean to bedrock.
NARRATOR: Draining the water
from under the Golden Gate Bridge
reveals a huge gorge.
It's far deeper than the rest of the bay.
Large enough to hide a 30-story building.
But what happens to the seabed
when the multi-beam vessel
heads west to the open ocean?
We're located a little over a kilometer
from the Golden Gate Bridge now
to the west,
but the bottom is still clean,
it's still bedrock lined.
NARRATOR:
As the boat moves further from the bridge,
the water grows much shallower.
The sonar readings suggest a dramatic
transformation in the seascape below.
The bottom is changing. We're seeing
a lot more sediment on the seafloor now.
NARRATOR: Draining the water
reveals an incredible sight.
We're starting to see
some very large sand waves here
that are emerging from the depths
of the Golden Gate Strait.
NARRATOR:
These formations on the seabed are huge.
So the largest sand waves are
about 200 meters long, six meters high,
the biggest ones ten meters high
or about three stories.
NARRATOR: And they're sitting
just yards away from the harbor entrance.
They look like probably
what the Sahara would look like
if you were walking through it.
NARRATOR: These giant sand waves
are caused by the huge tidal rush
through the Golden Gate Strait.
The fast-moving water picks up sand
and then dumps it as it slows down.
The sand waves at the mouth
of San Francisco Bay are there
because you have this very large estuary
and all the tidal flow associated with it,
roughly two trillion liters of water
being forced through on every tide.
NARRATOR: Huge tidal forces
push water through the narrow channel.
The solid bedrock of the gorge
does not erode.
So, the strait acts like a fire hose
as the water rushes through it.
And the flow is 160 times greater
than the volume of water
cascading over Niagara Falls.
You have all this sand and gravel
being carried along
and forced through this narrow opening
and then as the opening widens
further and further,
all this material gets deposited
in these bedforms.
NARRATOR: The drained landscape
shows how the geology of the seabed
shapes the powerful tidal currents
in San Francisco Bay.
First, the deep gorge that funnels
the water into a jet stream.
Moving west, beyond the bridge,
we follow the seabed
as it rises from over 300 feet deep
to just 130 feet.
The drain shows how the racing current
dumps thousands of tons of sand,
creating these giant sand waves
up to 30 feet high.
But what does this underwater landscape
of the Golden Gate
have to do with escaping from Alcatraz?
These racing tides are what
the inmates had to contend with
when fleeing the Rock.
Is it possible that Frank Morris
and the Anglin brothers
got caught in these wicked currents?
The records
from the 1962 FBI investigation
show the tide charts on June 11th.
From 9:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m.,
there was a strong outgoing tide,
which peaked at exactly 11:46 p.m.
So, when did the three escapees
hit the water in their homemade raft?
MARTINI: From the moment lights out
happened, which I think was 9:30,
as soon as they could've,
they would've gotten out of their cells,
give it an hour, hour-and-a-half to have
gotten everything that they needed to
through that vent on the roof,
across the cell house,
down the other side, hit the water.
I think that they started paddling
as soon as they got to the water.
Let's say 11:00.
NARRATOR: The three convicts
would have been in the water
at peak tidal flow
during an ebbing, outgoing tide.
What were their chances if their
flimsy raft made of raincoats broke up,
leaving them to swim
in the powerful currents?
BARNARD: If you tried to escape
off the north end of the island,
especially during ebbing tide
like they did in 1962,
where the currents are extremely strong
and moving straight out to sea,
it would have been very difficult
to swim out of that current.
Within an hour-and-a-half,
you could've been on the open coast.
NARRATOR:
So Morris and the Anglin brothers
had to struggle with the fastest
and deadliest current flow in the bay.
And these currents show no mercy.
They have been known to destroy vessels
far larger than a raft
San Francisco Bay is a ships' graveyard.
NARRATOR: Draining San Francisco Bay
reveals a deep, ominous gorge
under the Golden Gate Bridge
and giant sand waves
rising from the seabed,
evidence of massive water flow
through the mouth of the bay.
Two-and-a-half miles to the east
of the Golden Gate lies Alcatraz.
CANTWELL: This is a great example
of the tidal movement
around Alcatraz Island.
I'd gauge this at about a five-knot tide.
NARRATOR: It is possible to swim
from Alcatraz to the mainland,
but only during the brief period
when the tides are turning
and the currents slow down.
I've done this swim on a slack tide,
and there's no way
that you'd catch me in this water
trying to make it to San Francisco.
NARRATOR: Fierce currents were just
one of the challenges inmates faced
when they tried to escape.
There were other deadly hazards.
Bill Baker is one of the few
surviving inmates from Alcatraz.
A convict, he was sent to the Rock
for three years in 1957
after attempting to break out
from other prisons.
But escaping Alcatraz was another matter.
I thought about it a lot, but I couldn't
figure out how to beat the water,
because the water kills you
because it's cold.
That water is the wall that kept us here,
and it killed a lot of people
trying to escape,
and so that becomes very ugly,
you know, after you look at it a while.
NARRATOR: The frigid water
that frightened Bill Baker
is caused by the upwelling
of cold currents from the deep ocean.
These replace the warmer surface waters
relentlessly churned up
by the strong winds of San Francisco Bay.
Average temperatures range from
a bone-chilling 51
to 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
In these conditions, hypothermia
would quickly overwhelm any swimmer.
But when this cold water
is mixed with warm air,
it creates another killer
that silently invades the bay.
Fog.
Thick fog could be a prisoner's friend,
concealing a breakout from Alcatraz.
In 1937, two men escape from
the industries building into the fog.
They basically timed it
between the head counts.
They had about a 45-minute jump
on the officers
before they realized
that they were missing.
NARRATOR: For Ralph Roe and Ted Cole,
the fog offered cover
once they were off the island.
But the whiteout also posed a threat.
JAN NULL: If someone were to escape
into the foggy bay,
it would be almost
an impossible type of situation.
It'd be very dangerous,
it'd be disorienting.
So that would be almost
a worst-case type of scenario
for someone to try and escape in.
NARRATOR: Jan Null knows all about fog.
He has been a local
San Francisco meteorologist for years.
But why is fog so prevalent
in this part of the world?
The mechanism that creates
the classic fog for San Francisco is,
you know, a sea breeze circulation.
As that air flows over the very cold water
along the California coast,
it condenses out,
forms the marine layer, fog,
and then that spreads inland.
NARRATOR: There is only one place
for fog to reach San Francisco.
The only sea-level gap for that fog
to get through is the Golden Gate,
so that's the area
that's going to get the most fog.
It's focused, you know, from the gate
right toward Alcatraz
and then on toward Berkeley.
NARRATOR: When Roe and Cole escaped,
they quickly vanished into the whiteout.
MARTINI: It was December, it was cold.
One eyewitness, he saw them.
He claims to have seen them
in the water being swept out.
99.9% sure they didn't make it.
NARRATOR:
The thick fog made rescue impossible.
Roe and Cole were never seen again.
The FBI speculated
they had died in the icy water.
The San Francisco Bay fog mixed
with the wicked fast-moving currents
is a recipe for disaster.
By draining the water, we can see
the results of this deadly combination.
There are ghostly, large artifacts
scattered on the seabed.
Dozens of shipwrecks.
San Francisco Bay
is a graveyard of lost ships.
And there is one,
just east of the Golden Gate Bridge,
deep down on the side of the gorge,
that has a tragic tale to tell.
The shipwreck is the City of Chester.
But how did it get here?
August, 1888.
The City of Chester was moving
towards the Golden Gate Strait.
August is a time when you get
heavy fogs around here.
And it was foggy,
she's heading out the Golden Gate,
at the time when a great ocean liner
is heading in.
It was far larger, far faster.
NARRATOR: Now, 130 years later,
National Park historian Steve Haller
and archaeologist Peter Gavette
are searching for the lost vessel.
The City of Chester went down rapidly
and she sank in 200 or so feet of water.
We're over the spot where she lays.
NARRATOR: Multi-beam sonar
gives a tantalizing glimpse
of the sunken vessel.
You can see the superstructure.
GAVETTE: That's the stern there.
The fact that the City of Chester hasn't
been covered with sediment is great.
With the multi-beam data,
we can look at the City of Chester wreck
as it happened.
NARRATOR: Using the data from the scan,
we can now drain the wreck
of the City of Chester.
Does it offer any evidence
of how the disaster unfolded?
You can see exactly where
the fatal damage to the ship occurred
and you can see how that bow section
is off kilter with the rest of the ship,
so it broke her keel.
NARRATOR:
The drained ship is the crime scene,
giving clear evidence of its fate.
We can actually see where it was struck
just aft of the port side,
just aft of the bow
and almost split it in two.
NARRATOR: In the thick fog,
the City of Chester
and the White Star Liner Oceanic
were on a collision course.
They did not see each other
until far too late.
Powerful currents drove them together.
The City of Chester heals off to port,
the Oceanic hits her in the side,
far heavier vessel, splits her hull.
NARRATOR:
The smaller ship was fatally wounded.
The City of Chester sank in six minutes,
killing 16 people on board.
She is just one of many shipwrecks that
lie on the bottom of San Francisco Bay,
the deadly result
of extreme natural forces
that make this bay so dangerous.
These are the same forces that escapees
from Alcatraz had to contend with.
Most notably,
Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers,
who escaped the island prison
on June 11th, 1962.
What would their chances have been
in these conditions?
If you consider
that two ocean-going steamers
can get tossed around to the point
where one cuts the other one in half,
what are the odds of three guys
in a rapidly deflating,
homemade rubber raft gonna have?
NARRATOR:
But could the powerful currents in the bay
have instead helped the escapees?
Could they have been pushed to shore,
and to freedom?
In 1962, three prisoners launched
a legendary escape from Alcatraz
in a homemade raft.
Ever since, there have been wildly
different rumors about their fate.
Some claim to have seen them
on the mainland.
But that conflicts
with the official FBI report,
which states that their objective
was Angel Island,
a two-mile paddle north of Alcatraz.
MARTINI:
They did what nobody else ever did.
They got off the island with a head start,
and were never seen again.
CANTWELL:
The official Bureau of Prisons report
on these three men in the raft
is that the raft took on water,
the men were in the San Francisco Bay,
they became hypothermic and the currents
took them out to the Pacific.
NARRATOR: But this was never proved.
And when the story broke around the world,
there was excitement and intrigue.
NEWSCASTER: It appears to be
the first successful escape
in the history
of the maximum-security prison.
NARRATOR:
For weeks, the FBI searched the bay.
Their goal was to find them dead or alive.
NEWSCASTER:
The escape triggered the greatest manhunt
in San Francisco's history.
NARRATOR: Though they never discovered
any trace of the bodies,
the FBI did find evidence of the escape.
They recovered two
of the inflatable life vests.
They recovered two of the plywood paddles
found floating
in different places in the bay.
Another one of the life vests
was recovered outside the Golden Gate
at a beach north of the Golden Gate.
There was no lack of evidence
that they escaped.
NARRATOR: This evidence was scattered
all over the Bay Area,
with no signs of the men.
How did this happen?
Could the three fugitives have made it?
Is there a possibility that the strong
currents worked in the escapees' favor
by pushing them to the shore?
Patrick Barnard
and USGS colleague Josh Logan
will explore this intriguing theory.
They will use high-tech buoys
with GPS sensors to track the currents.
BARNARD: The conditions are very similar
to what they would have been
during the escape in 1962.
We're at peak ebb flow.
The water is moving
about a meter-and-a-half a second,
or about five-and-a-half kilometers
per hour.
LOGAN: The GPS will be recording
its position every five seconds.
We'll be able to pick that up
on our laptop
and be able to track it in real time.
And that'll let us know the direction
and the speed that the water's moving.
Okay, so we are tracking now.
I'm going to deploy the drifter.
NARRATOR: The buoy is dropped
at the north end of Alcatraz
on the escapees' route to Angel Island.
At first the buoy's path
seems to confirm the theory
that the men were swept out to sea.
LOGAN: It's drifting about, averaging
about six kilometers an hour right now.
In 15 minutes we've drifted
about half the distance
between Alcatraz and the Golden Gate.
It looks like it is going right down
the middle of the Golden Gate Strait.
NARRATOR: Even in a strong headwind,
the fast-moving current
is taking the buoy out to sea.
But then, the unexpected happens.
It was going about six kilometers
an hour until it hit that seam
and then it slowed down
to one kilometer an hour.
NARRATOR: The buoy has stopped
just before the Golden Gate Bridge.
It's not what the team predicted.
All right, it looks like it just sort of
slowed down because it got into an eddy.
That's pretty interesting.
So you can see it was traveling
southwest in a straight line
until it hit that eddy and then it
slowed down and changed directions.
NARRATOR: An eddy is created
by water moving in a circular motion,
almost like a slow-moving whirlpool.
Can draining the water
from San Francisco Bay
reveal anything that would cause
such a giant eddy?
Just east of the bridge
there is a strange feature on the seabed.
BARNARD: Right toward the Golden Gate,
there's some very shallow depths
from a large bedrock outcrop,
known as a sill, in this location,
and so this causes an uprush
of a lot of water
and eventually some flow separation,
causing this eddy.
NARRATOR: The deep-water currents
run directly into this bedrock sill,
forcing the fast-flowing water
to the surface.
This creates the giant eddy which has
stopped the buoy dead in its track.
Draining San Francisco Bay is revealing
how powerful currents on the surface
that swept men to their deaths
are shaped by the contours below.
There are other strange features on the
seabed which explain the deadly outcome
of an earlier escape attempt.
Convicted burglar Aaron Burgett made
a break for freedom in September 1958.
His friend, Bill Baker,
was an inmate at the time.
Well, he was a young man. He was, like I
say, he was strong and he was, you know,
strong as a mule.
NARRATOR: While on garbage detail,
Burgett overcame a guard
and then jumped into the waters
off the west side of Alcatraz.
They didn't know what happened
to Burgett and they locked us all down.
There were boats circling the island
all day and night, you know,
with searchlights and everything.
Every day that passed, we were
more optimistic that he was gone.
NARRATOR:
Though the prisoners hoped he made it,
two weeks later
the authorities found Burgett.
But then one day his body washed up
and then that was the end of that.
I was very sad about that because
I hoped like heck that he made it.
NARRATOR:
Strangely, Burgett's body was found
just yards off the shores of Alcatraz.
So why wasn't he washed out to sea
by the powerful currents in the bay?
The clues may lie in the shallow waters
around Alcatraz.
They've never
been accurately mapped before.
Now Professor Rikk Kvitek from
California State University, Monterey,
will use a one-of-a-kind surveying vessel
to explore the terrain.
It's designed to work in all the places
a conventional vessel can't go.
It can work in shallow water around rocks
and it's outfitted
with all the sonar systems
found on a normal hydrographic vessel
except it's all operated by one.
NARRATOR:
After a day of scanning the shallows,
back and forth along the western cliffs,
Professor Kvitek's survey helps explain
what happened to Aaron Burgett's body.
The drained seabed around Alcatraz shows
dozens of large rocks and crevices.
When Burgett drowned,
his body probably sank to the bottom
and became trapped in these rocks.
Later, as it decomposed,
gases forming in the corpse
would have lifted it to the surface.
The 1962 escapees
didn't try to swim to freedom.
They used a homemade raft.
But where they ended up,
lost out at sea, or safe on the mainland,
is the real mystery.
NARRATOR: Patrick Barnard and Josh Logan
are hoping to confirm
how the seabed in San Francisco Bay
influences the water currents above.
They want to determine the course
the escaping prisoners took in 1962.
The first test buoy stopped dead
in a giant eddy.
They now deploy two other buoys
in different locations
along the route to Angel Island.
Ah, we're going to release it
a little bit further north
from where we released the last drifter.
NARRATOR: The two buoys begin
their journey towards the Golden Gate.
The second moves down
into the same eddy as the first,
but the third buoy
heads directly towards the Bridge.
This one seems to be heading out the gate
instead of getting caught in that eddy
that we saw further to the south.
NARRATOR:
Moments later, it's past the bridge.
So that third buoy is basically gone
straight out the main channel
and has sped up.
NARRATOR: The drained seabed
shows exactly why
this buoy is moving southwest.
As it floats slightly further north,
it moves past the bedrock sill
and misses the eddy.
Then powerful currents sweep it
through the gorge
and under the Golden Gate Bridge.
Soon, the buoy is in the open ocean.
We deployed it for about an hour
and it went 6.8 kilometers
at a maximum speed
of ten kilometers an hour.
It's about in line
with the predictions of the model.
I was surprised
the first two didn't make it out.
But they got caught in these eddies.
And this one was going pretty much
right as the model predicted
peaking at ten kilometers per hour,
which is far faster than anybody can swim.
NARRATOR: Getting caught in the eddies
may not have saved the escapees.
They had to fight against powerful
currents to get to the mainland.
Anybody that's trying to paddle to shore,
they'd be heading southwest
and they'd probably be going sideways.
NARRATOR: The buoy test
throws fascinating new light
on the 1962 FBI report.
The two buoys caught in the eddy
moved in different directions
including one that amazingly
floated back towards Alcatraz.
This could explain
why debris from the prisoners' raft
was found near the island
after the escape.
The path of the third buoy
shows that if the prisoners drowned,
as the FBI believed,
their heavy bodies
could have been swept out to sea
by the ferocious currents.
But the test truly shows one thing--
San Francisco Bay is unpredictable.
BARNARD: The current field is so complex
that you could have literally just been
just a few meters on either side
of the main part of the channel
and you could have ended up
in completely different places.
You could end up ten kilometers out to sea
or almost right back at Alcatraz.
NARRATOR: But for the three inmates,
if they did reach the open ocean,
there was one more deadly challenge.
Because of its high population
of great white sharks,
this area is known as the Red Triangle.
In June of '62, it would have also been
during upwelling season like it is now.
BARNARD: So, you have lots of nutrients
in the water column.
Lots of fish
and lots of bigger predators, so...
it's likely there could have been more
great whites in the area than there are
during the rest of the year.
NARRATOR: So if they made it
this far out, dead or alive,
they may have become prey
for the great whites.
The bodies of the three inmates
were never found.
But now science shows that it is unlikely
that they could have survived.
The infamous prison closed its doors
in 1963 with a perfect record.
Officially, there were no successful
escapes from Alcatraz,
though many tried.
The conditions surrounding this island
is what really made it
an escape-proof prison.
MARTINI: The bay was the most
formidable of the prison's walls.
You could say that the bay
has really created Alcatraz's reputation.
NARRATOR: The "perfect prison" was
the result of extraordinary geology.
Deep gorges, giant underwater sand dunes,
hard bedrock pillars
at the Golden Gate Strait,
powerful currents and even great predators
that roam the waters outside the bay.
All natural phenomena
that made the Rock inescapable.
But there is another mighty natural force
at work in San Francisco Bay
that dwarfs even the power
of the ocean currents.
A drained Pacific Ocean
reveals the first clue.
Deep under the waters
off the coast of San Francisco
lies the infamous San Andreas Fault.
The shifting tectonic plates have
caused major earthquakes in the past,
the most-deadly in 1906.
Over 3,000 people lost their lives.
But could an even deadlier earthquake
hit the area?
The so called "Big One."
So in our forecast
we actually consider an earthquake
that could start at the southernmost part
of the San Andreas Fault,
run all the way along through the Bay Area
up north, involves the entire
San Andreas Fault zone.
That earthquake would be on
the scale of 8.2 to 8.4 in magnitude.
NARRATOR:
The devastation would be far greater
than the destruction
caused by the 1989 quake.
TOM PARSONS: If we were to see an earthquake
of that scale in San Francisco,
that would cause, unfortunately,
a lot of casualties.
Many buildings would collapse.
Freeways and infrastructure-type things
would be in danger.
If it did happen, I think we would see
significant destruction in the city
and throughout the Bay Area
and throughout California.
NARRATOR: The massive earthquake
could cause parts of the city
to topple into the sea,
much of the downtown core destroyed.
The Golden Gate Bridge
pushed to its engineering limits.
But when the fire and smoke clears,
one place will still be standing.
TOM PARSONS: During a big earthquake,
Alcatraz would be a safe haven
'cause it is built
out of very strong rock.
It's not going to collapse under
strong shaking like soft soil would.
It's been there for 100 million years,
it's hung in there.
So it's gonna do well
during an earthquake.
MARTINI: If the geologists are correct,
and when the San Andreas lets go,
Alcatraz is the safest place to be.
That is the ultimate irony.
The island that so many men
wanted to get away from
is the place that's gonna offer
the refuge.
NARRATOR: By draining Alcatraz
and exposing the secrets
hidden on the seabed,
a different picture of the island emerges.
The explanations
behind its most legendary mysteries
involve more than just the prison itself.
The geography of San Francisco Bay,
the waters, the rocks,
the wind and the fog,
a tightly woven net
making Alcatraz an inescapable place.
Unless the "Big One" hits.
By draining the waters around Alcatraz,
the secrets of the Rock
have been revealed.
Captioned by
Pixel Logic Media