Arcadia Public Library

Embracing the spirit of the counterculture revolution during the Summer of Love, wealthy Marin County businessman Don McCoy transforms his life from conservative entrepreneur to beneficent hippie dropout, using his family inheritance to lease Rancho Olompali, a 700-acre estate north of San Francisco, to start a commune. He invites a couple dozen like-minded friends and families to join him in his dream of creating a community where they can live without...

A film about creativity and survival during the Great Depression of the 1930s, with striking parallels to today. Depression-era life and art come alive with rare film clips and personal stories from survivors.

What would the Tower of Pisa be if it weren't leaning? Certainly not as attractive to tourists. That was the issue faced by the late-20th-century engineers who devised a way to reduce the tower's angle of tilt. Take a journey through the centuries to explore how various engineers tried to stabilize the leaning tower, but only succeeded in making the problem worse.

When the Tay Bridge in Scotland was completed in 1878, it became the longest bridge in the world. Discover the behind-the-scenes details of the bridge design and construction, and how the failure of one single, simple connection triggered a chain of events that brought down a 4,000-ton structure.

What role should corporate culture play in the development of an airplane? Discover what went wrong in the development of Boeing's 737 MAX and how the flawed design of the airplane's flight control system led to 346 deaths in two separate crashes. Have we learned the apparently difficult lesson that prioritizing the corporate bottom line over technological excellence does not work?

One spring evening in the mid-19th century, a three-span iron bridge across England's River Dee collapsed just as a locomotive reached the middle of the third span. Railroad technology was only just coming of age, and this collapse was one of its most serious accidents to date. Discover how this accident inquiry led to improved bridge safety throughout the country.

In 1976, the American Institute of Architects presented an Honor Award to Helmut Jahn for his innovative design of the Kemper Arena in Kansas City. Three years later, a 43,000-square-foot section of the roof collapsed. Follow the forensic engineers as they painstakingly analyze the arena's innovative design and identify four major factors that contributed to the roof's collapse.

You know that if you don't maintain your car, it can stop working. But we have often overlooked that lesson when it comes to bridges. Follow the fascinating case of the Mianus River Bridge and discover how lack of maintenance caused its collapse in 1983, although the bridge had just been inspected. What happened to those pin-and-hanger connections? And exactly, whose fault was it?

Within days of filling its reservoir, the Teton Dam began to leak. By the end of the day the dam had been breached and the reservoir poured down the Teton Valley in a tidal wave. Explore the potentially catastrophic effects of water moving through soil under pressure—whether in dams and levees or in the liquefaction caused by earthquakes.

What does a 19th-century British railway disaster have in common with the 21st-century destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans? All were engineering failures that resulted in important improvements in the engineering process. Discover the very human issues that contributed to poor engineering decisions in these three cases, with disastrous consequences.