60 Minutes (1968) s47e10 Episode Script
Falling Apart | Chernobyl | Forgotten Corner of Hell
There are a lot of people in the United States right now who think the country is falling apart, and at least in one respect they're correct.
Our roads and bridges are crumbling, our airports are out of date and the vast majority of our seaports are in danger of becoming obsolete.
All the result of decades of neglect.
None of this is really in dispute.
Business leaders, labor unions, governors, mayors, congressmen and presidents have complained about a lack of funding for years, but aside from a one time cash infusion from the stimulus program, nothing much has changed.
There is still no consensus on how to solve the problem or where to get the massive amounts of money needed to fix it, just another example of political paralysis in Washington.
Tens of millions of American cross over bridges every day without giving it much thought, unless they hit a pothole.
But the infrastructure problem goes much deeper than pavement.
It goes to crumbling concrete and corroded steel and the fact that nearly 70,000 bridges in America -- one out of every nine -- is now considered to be structurally deficient.
Ray LaHood: Our infrastructure is on life support right now.
That's what we're on.
Few people are more aware of the situation than Ray LaHood, who was secretary of transportation during the first Obama administration, and before that a seven-term Republican congressman from Illinois.
He is currently co-chairman of Building America's Future, a bipartisan coalition of current and former elected officials that is urgently pushing for more spending on infrastructure.
Steve Kroft: According to the government, there are 70,000 bridges that have been deemed structurally deficient.
Ray LaHood: Yep.
Steve Kroft: What does that mean? Ray LaHood: It means that there are bridges that need to be really either replaced or repaired in a very dramatic way.
Steve Kroft: They're dangerous? Ray LaHood: I don't want to say they're unsafe.
But they're dangerous.
I would agree with that.
Steve Kroft: If you were going to take me someplace, any place in the country, to illustrate the problem, where would you take me? Ray LaHood: There is a lot of places we could go.
You could go to any major city in America and see roads, and bridges, and infrastructure that need to be fixed today.
They need to be fixed today.
We decided to start in Pittsburgh, which may have the most serious problem in the country.
Our guide was Andy Herrmann, a past president of the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Steve Kroft: From up here you can see why they call it the city of bridges.
Andy Herrmann: Yeah.
Between the highway and the railroad bridges.
There's many of them.
Steve Kroft: And most of them old.
Andy Herrmann: Most of them old.
They're nearing the end of their useful lives, yeah.
There are more than more than 4,000 bridges in metropolitan Pittsburgh and 20 percent of them are structurally deficient, including one of the city's main arteries.
Steve Kroft: This is the Liberty Bridge ahead? An important bridge for Pittsburgh.
Andy Herrmann: A very important bridge for Pittsburgh.
A connection from the south to the city itself, and then to the north.
It was built in 1928 when cars and trucks were much lighter.
It was designed to last in Pittsburgh five million people travel across bridges that either need to be replaced or undergo major repairs.
Andy Herrmann: One of these arch bridges actually has a structure built under it to catch falling deck.
See that structure underneath it? They actually built that to catch any of the falling concrete so it wouldn't hit traffic underneath it.
Steve Kroft: That's amazing.
Andy Herrmann: It all comes down to funding.
Right now they can't keep up with it.
Three hundred bridges become structurally deficient each year in the state of Pennsylvania.
That's one percent added to the already 23 percent they already have.
They just can't fix them fast enough.
Pennsylvania is one of the worst states in country when it comes to the condition of its infrastructure, and Philadelphia isn't any better off than Pittsburgh.
Nine million people a day travel over 900 bridges classified as structurally deficient, some of them on a heavily traveled section of I-95.
Ed Rendell is a former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania.
Steve Kroft: How critical is this stretch of I-95 to the country? Ed Rendell: It's a nation's number one highway.
Twenty-two miles of it goes through the city of Philadelphia.
There are 15 structurally deficient bridges in that 22-mile stretch.
And to fix them would cost seven billion dollars -- to fix all the roads and the structurally deficient bridges in that 22-mile stretch.
Rendell says no one knows where the money is going to come from and this stretch of I-95 has already had one brush with disaster.
In 2008 two contractors from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation stopped to get a sausage sandwich, and parked their cars under this bridge.
Ed Rendell: And fortunately they wanted that sausage sandwich because they saw one of these piers with an eight foot gash in it about five inches wide.
And oh, they knew automatically that this bridge was in deep trouble.
The section of I-95 was immediately shut down and blocked off while construction crews buttressed the column with steel girders.
It was closed for three days, creating havoc in Philadelphia.
But the city was lucky.
Ed Rendell: I mean, it was unbelievable.
It's so fortuitous.
Steve Kroft: And if they hadn't wanted a sausage sandwich? Ed Rendell: There's a strong likelihood that bridge would have collapsed.
These all are tragedies waiting to happen.
The I-95 bridges were built in the early 1960s and are now more than 50 years old.
The same vintage as the I-35 bridge that collapsed in Minnesota back in 2007, killing 13 people and injuring 145.
The antiquated Skagit River Bridge in Washington state that collapsed last May after a truck hit one of the trusses was even older.
And it's not just bridges.
According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, 32 percent of the major roads in America are now in poor condition and in need of major repairs.
Yet the major source of revenue -- the federal Highway Trust Fund, which gets its money from the federal gas tax of 18 cents a gallon -- is almost insolvent.
Former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood says it will go broke by next spring unless something is done.
Ray LaHood: That's the pot of money that over system in the world, which is now falling apart.
Steve Kroft: Why? How did it get this way? Ray LaHood: It's falling apart because we haven't made the investments.
We haven't got the money.
The last time we raised the gas tax, which is how we built the interstate system, was 1993.
Steve Kroft: What has the resistance been? Ray LaHood: Politicians in Washington don't have the political courage to say, "This is what we have to do.
" That's what it takes.
Steve Kroft: They don't want to spend the money? They don't want to raise the taxes? Ray LaHood: That's right.
They don't want to spend the money.
They don't want to raise the taxes.
They don't really have a vision of America the way that other Congresses have had a vision of America.
LaHood says public spending on infrastructure has fallen to its lowest level since 1947.
And the U.
S.
, which used to have the finest infrastructure in the world, is now ranked behind Iceland, Spain, Portugal and the United Arab Emirates.
It's a fact that's not been lost the most powerful economic and political lobbies in the country who believe the inaction threatens the country's economic future.
Big corporations like Caterpillar and GE say it's hurting their ability to compete abroad.
And at a Senate hearing earlier this year Tom Donohue, president of the generally conservative U.
S.
Chamber of Commerce voiced strong business support for raising the gas tax for the first time in 20 years.
[Tom Donohue: First, let's start by having some courage, and showing some leadership.
For once, let's do what's right, not what's politically expedient.
Second, let's educate the public and your fellow lawmakers.
.]
He was joined by Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, who said that every billion dollars spent on transportation infrastructure would create 35,000 well-paying jobs.
[Richard Trumka: If business and labor can come before you united on this issue -- and we are united on this issue despite our sharp disagreements on a variety of other matters -- I think that should tell everybody something and tell it very loudly.
.]
But it was not heard during the midterm elections where there was virtually no public debate on infrastructure and that has barely changed in the weeks that have followed.
We wanted to talk to Pennsylvania Congressman Bill Shuster, the chairman of the House Transportation Committee and made numerous requests over the last five months for an on-camera interview.
All of them were declined.
We did the same with Michigan Congressman Dave Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which has to come up with the money to fund transportation projects; we met with the same result.
But we did talk with one of the committee members, Earl Blumenauer, a nine-term Oregon Democrat.
He says the last time Congress passed a major six-year transportation bill was in 1997, since then there have been Rep.
Earl Blumenauer: I've actually been trying now for 44 months to at least get a hearing on transportation finance on the Highway Trust Fund that is slowly going bankrupt, and we've not had a single one.
Steve Kroft: Why can't you get a hearing? Rep.
Earl Blumenauer: It has, to this point, not raised to the level of priority for the Republican leadership.
Although, in fairness, when the Democrats were in charge we had a few hearings, but not much action.
Steve Kroft: So you see this as a bipartisan failure.
Rep.
Earl Blumenauer: Absolutely.
The Bush administration, they had two blue ribbon commissions about infrastructure finance that recommended a lot more money, and additionally the gas tax being increased.
We couldn't get them to accept being able to move forward.
Since President Obama's been in office, there has been, to be charitable, a lack of enthusiasm for raising the gas tax.
And the problems with transportation infrastructure go well beyond roads and bridges and the gas tax.
There's aviation.
A shortage of airports runways and gates along outmoded air traffic control systems have made U.
S.
air travel the most congested in the world.
And then there are seaports: when a new generation of big cargo ships begin going through an expanded Panama Canal in another year or so, only two of the 14 major ports on the East Coast will be dredged deep enough to accommodate them.
There are more than 14,000 miles of high-speed rail operating around the world, but none in the United States.
In Chicago, it can take a freight train nearly as long to go across the city, as it would for the same train to go from Chicago to Los Angeles.
But perhaps the most glaring example of neglect and inaction may be this sad little railroad bridge over the Hackensack River in New Jersey.
It was built 104 years ago and is, according to Amtrak President and CEO Joe Boardman, critical to the U.
S.
economy.
Joe Boardman: This is the Achilles heel that we have on the Northeast Corridor.
Steve Kroft: How much traffic goes over it every day? Joe Boardman: It's almost 500 trains a day.
It's the busiest bridge in the Western Hemisphere for train traffic, period.
Steve Kroft: And what kind of shape is it in? Joe Boardman: It's safe, Steve, but it's not reliable.
And it's getting less reliable.
It's old.
Its systems are breaking down.
There's an inability to make it work on a regular, reliable basis.
Boardman says the Portal Bridge is based on a design from the 1840s and was already obsolete shortly after it was completed in 1910.
It's a swing bridge that needs to be opened several times a week so barges can pass up and down the river.
It takes about a half an hour.
The problem is it fails to lock back into place on a regular basis.
Steve Kroft: And what kind of problems does that cause? Joe Boardman: It causes trains to stack up on both sides.
And actually, when a train stacks up here, it can stack up all the way down to Washington and all the way back up to Boston.
This is a single point of failure.
That's one of the biggest worries we have on this corridor is these single points of failure.
Amtrak's president says the bridge has to be replaced, the design work has already been completed, and the project, which would cost just under a billion dollars, is shovel ready.
Joe Boardman: If Congress wants to do something now, build this bridge.
It's ready to be done.
It's been ready for two years.
Build it.
It's tangible evidence that they can really get something done.
It's less a case of wanting to get something done, than coming up with the hundreds of billions of dollars needed to do it.
There is no shortage of ideas from Democrats or Republicans who've suggested everything from raising the gas tax to funding infrastructure through corporate tax reform.
But there is no consensus and not much political support for any of the alternatives as Andy Herrmann told us last summer, when we were flying over Pittsburgh.
Andy Herrmann: You're sitting there at these committee meetings; they seem to agree with you.
Yes, we have to make investments in infrastructure.
Yes, we have to do these things.
But then they come around and say, "Well, where are we going to get the money?" And you sort of sit to yourself and say to yourself, "Well, we elected you to figure that out.
" Some tragedies never end.
Ask people to name a nuclear disaster and most will probably point to Fukushima in Japan three years ago.
The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl in Ukraine was 30 years ago, but the crisis is still with us today.
That's because radiation virtually never dies.
After the explosion in 1986, the Soviets built a primitive sarcophagus, a tomb to cover the stricken reactor.
But it wasn't meant to last very long and it hasn't.
Engineers say there is still enough radioactive material in there to cause widespread contamination.
For the last five years a massive project has been underway to seal the reactor permanently.
But the undertaking is three quarters of a billion dollars short and the completion date has been delayed repeatedly.
Thirty years later, Chernobyl's crippled reactor still has the power to kill.
It's called the Zone and getting into it is crossing a border into one of the most contaminated places on Earth.
The 20-mile no man's land was evacuated nearly 30 years ago.
Drive to the center of the Zone today and you'll see a massive structure that appears to rise out of nowhere.
It's an engineering effort the likes of which the world has never seen.
With funds from over 40 different countries, 1,400 workers are building a giant arch to cover the damaged reactor like a casserole.
It will be taller than the Statue of Liberty and wider than Yankee Stadium -- the largest movable structure on Earth.
Nicholas Caille is overseeing the arch's construction.
Bob Simon: You know when you think about it, you have this massive project going on.
All these people working here.
Billions of dollars being spent because of one day 30 years ago.
Nicolas Caille: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right.
It was the biggest disaster of the nuclear industry, yes.
The disaster was sparked by massive explosions that tore the roof off of Chernobyl's reactor number four, spewing radioactive dust into the atmosphere.
The Soviets drafted over half a million troops to put out the fire and clear the nuclear debris.
Thousands got seriously ill from radiation exposure.
Today, three decades later, the cleanup continues.
But as this recent video shows, the reactor is still packed with poison: heaps of gnarled steel and concrete, pools of nuclear fuel that have hardened into a dense mass called the "elephant's foot.
" There's still so much radiation coming from the reactor that workers have to construct the arch nearly a thousand feet away, shielded by a massive concrete wall.
When finished, the arch will be slid into place around the Sarcophagus, then sealed up.
Nicolas Caille: We will push it in once, the average speed it will be around 10 meters an hour.
So it's approximately the speed of a snail.
Bob Simon: Right.
But that's pretty rapid considering the size of this thing.
Nicolas Caille: It is.
Yes, yes.
But the construction itself will have to move a lot quicker.
The old plant and sarcophagus are falling apart.
Just two years ago, a snow storm caused the roof of one of the buildings to collapse, forcing workers to be evacuated and raising fears of further contamination.
Radiation is not subject to the usual rules of life and death.
It is virtually eternal.
When Caille took us on a tour of the site, we were fitted with dosimeters to tell us how much we were being exposed to.
Suddenly, a sound we didn't want to hear.
Bob Simon: Hey, there's beepers going off.
Nicolas Caille: No, no.
It's not.
It's normal.
Bob Simon: You're sure? Nicolas Caille: Yes, yes, yes.
I'm definitively sure.
Bob Simon: I don't like a beeper in Chernobyl.
I don't like that sound.
Building the arch under these conditions is challenging enough.
But some of the biggest obstacles have nothing to do with radiation.
As violence gripped Ukraine this year, one of the arch's contractors backed out.
The project is also 770 million dollars short, and it has been plagued by repeated delays.
No matter when it's completed, vast stretches of the Zone will never recover.
This is the city of Pripyat, two miles from the reactor.
Thirty years ago, the population was 50,000.
Today it is zero.
Pripyat was where many of the plant's workers lived, grateful for their posting in a town that was the model of Soviet modernity.
Nine-story apartment buildings lined this boulevard.
They're still there, but you can't see them anymore.
The forest has taken over.
A vision perhaps of what the whole world might look like were people to just disappear.
It was springtime in Pripyat that day in 1986, and an amusement park was due to open in a few days.
Andre Glukhov lived here then.
Bob Simon: So, that Ferris wheel never had any kids in it? Andrey Glukhov: Never had any kids.
These bumper cars, on your left, had never kids on it, too.
Bob Simon: When you talk to your former neighbors, what do you call it? The accident? the catastrophe? Andrey Glukhov: We just call it 26, which was the date of the accident.
Bob Simon: Twenty-six? Andrey Glukhov: Twenty-sixth of April.
Bob Simon: Sort of like the Americans call Andrey Glukhov: Exactly.
Back then, Glukhov worked for Chernobyl's nuclear safety division.
He took us on a tour through a part of the plant that had not been destroyed.
He was off duty that night, but what he saw when he drove past the damaged reactor was like nothing he, or anyone else, had ever seen.
[Andrey Glukhov: This is the control room.]
Andrey Glukhov: This was a terrifying picture.
It looked like a sunset in the distance, about glowing core of the reactor.
Bob Simon: That was the first and the only time you saw it? Andrey Glukhov: No, that was the first time when I realized the scale of the disaster.
Glukhov told his family in Pripyat to stay inside and close the windows.
Soviet authorities covered the area with secrecy, told people they had nothing to worry about.
But 36 hours later, over a thousand busses were sent in to evacuate everyone.
Authorities told people it would only be for three days -- one of many lies.
The people never came back, and Pripyat is being overwhelmed by the elements.
One of the only things still recognizable is that old Soviet iconography.
Drive through the Zone, and you'll find that many villages suffered the same fate as Pripyat.
A row of simple markers has been planted with the names of each one.
But amidst this wilderness, the strangest sight of all.
People, just a few.
Ivan Ivanovitch and his wife Maria were evacuated to an apartment block near Kiev after the accident, but couldn't take it.
They weren't made for the city, so two years later, they came back.
Today, there are three other people living in this village just a few miles from the old power plant.
Bob Simon: When you decided to come back to live here, did anyone tell you it was dangerous? Ivan Ivanovitch: It's really OK here.
You know, when I lived in that apartment block, I got sick all the time.
But when I came back here, I was fine.
And I've been fine ever since.
Bob Simon: You should never leave home.
Ivan Ivanovitch: I would be long gone if I'd stayed there.
I'd be in the ground.
Despite the danger, Tim Mousseau also chose to be here.
For the last 15 years, the University of South Carolina biologist has been studying the contamination's impact from a makeshift lab inside the Zone.
Bob Simon: Aren't many serious labs I've seen that look like this.
Tim Mousseau: Yeah this is an opportunistic lab.
It's an old villager's house.
Mousseau's research has shown that the catastrophe continues to take its toll.
Tim Mousseau: And we're going to attempt to measure just how radioactive these mice are.
Bob Simon: What's the comparison between the amounts of radiation a mouse would have here and a mouse somewhere else? Tim Mousseau: Some of these mice have on the order of 10,000 times more radioactivity in their bodies than in clean areas.
The human toll has been profound as well.
Thyroid cancer and leukemia affected thousands -- though the exact number of deaths is still being debated.
Tim Mousseau: There certainly is evidence that some of the genetic damage that occurs at the level of the DNA can be transmitted from one generation to the next.
Bob Simon: So a nuclear disaster is never over? Tim Mousseau: There will be areas that will be contaminated for thousands, if not millions, of years.
This makes the Zone like no other place on Earth, which is why it's attracting tourists.
If you've done Paris and Rome, why not try a holiday in hell.
Check out the apocalypse? Bob Simon: How did your friends react when you told them you were coming on vacation to Chernobyl? David McHale: They thought it was very strange, you know.
But, I mean, people have been coming here for a while, so you know, I guess it must be safe.
Bob Simon: You guess it must be safe.
What makes you believe it's safe? David McHale: Well, you know, I would assume that the guides wouldn't bring people here if it wasn't safe.
Bob Simon: All right, well, I hope you're right.
David McHale: So do I.
Thousands of workers flood into the Zone every day, to look after what remains of the plant.
Others live here year-round, in one of the few places safe enough for inhabitants: the town of Chernobyl itself.
Yevgen Goncharenko was our guide.
He lives here too.
Bob Simon: Why are you living here and not in Kiev? Yevgen Goncharenko: Because I like this place.
For me and it's very interesting maybe even sacred place for me.
Bob Simon: A sacred place? Yevgen Goncharenko: For me, yeah.
He spends much of his time writing music on his bass guitar.
Music as desolate as the landscape surrounding him.
As desolate as the remains of this empire that has long since disappeared.
A decade after the disaster, workers here built a monument honoring their colleagues whose lives had been destroyed.
Bob Simon: The workers and the firemen made the monument themselves? Yevgen Goncharenko: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Bob Simon: And what does it say? Yevgen Goncharenko: "To those who saved the world.
" Bob Simon: "To those who saved the world.
" That may sound a bit hyperbolic.
But when the reactor exploded in 1986, radioactive dust and debris were carried as far away as Italy and Sweden.
Until the arch finally seals up that stricken reactor, and no one knows when that might be, something like that could happen again.
Unlike other historic relics, Chernobyl does not belong to the past; its power will never die.
Chernobyl is forever.
More than 400,000 Americans died fighting in the Second World War.
Adding to the heartache of that staggering loss, nearly one in five of those killed was declared missing in action.
To this day, the families of some 73,000 unaccounted for servicemen have lived with the mystery of how they died and have been deprived of the comfort that comes from a burial.
At the end of the war, the technology didn't exist to find and identify many of the missing, but today it does.
This is the remarkable story of a group of volunteers who spend their own time and money quietly searching for these long lost servicemen -- remarkable because of what they've discovered in recent years.
They are doing it, they say, for the fallen and their families.
And focus on Palau, a Pacific island nation that saw some of the fiercest fighting of the war 70 years ago, a place some pilots called "a forgotten corner of hell.
" Fly today over Palau's 586 small islands and miles of barrier reefs and you'll see no sign of the carnage that once occurred here.
But beneath the jungle canopy you can still find the rusted ruins of Japanese anti-aircraft guns; and in the clear blue water, a graveyard of planes and the men who flew them.
As the Second World War raged in the Pacific, the islands of Palau were teeming with Japanese soldiers and under attack by American planes.
The skies overhead were filled with Hellcats, Corsairs, Avengers and B-24 Liberators.
On September 1, 1944, this B-24, number 453, and its crew took off on a bombing mission.
[Announcer: A Liberator is hit!.]
out of the sky and disappeared into the sea.
It was one of more than 200 American planes lost over Palau during the war.
[Announcer: Our Pacific island warfare is not cheap.
.]
Dr.
Pat Scannon: This was a tough place.
This was no pushover.
There was as much anti-aircraft fire available in this part of the Pacific as anything that was over Tokyo.
Today, Dr.
Pat Scannon leads a group of volunteers that look for the wreckage of American warplanes and the missing airmen who flew them, including the BentProp Project.
Many have military backgrounds.
With permission from the Palaun government, they come every year, paying their own expenses, to search in the sea and on land.
[Dr.
Pat Scannon: I think that's what took my breath away when I saw that star and bar.
.]
When Scannon's team finds the remains of Americans, they inform the U.
S.
military, whose job it is to recover and identify the missing airmen.
It all started when Scannon was vacationing in Palau 20 years ago and came across the wing of a B-24 with its propeller sticking out of the water at low tide.
The bent prop gave the group its name.
Anderson Cooper: Did it surprise you that it was still there? Dr.
Pat Scannon: Oh absolutely.
Anderson Cooper: That moment you saw that, what did you think? Dr.
Pat Scannon: I think somebody died there.
The wing and engine of the B-24 Scannon found in 1993 are still here -- the propeller undisturbed in a few feet of water.
Scannon says he hasn't been the same since he first found it.
Dr.
Pat Scannon: It was one of those special moments in life where from one step to the next I knew I had to know what went on.
It just was wrong to me that this wing is sitting here and nobody knows anything about it.
Finding the answers rarely comes easily or quickly.
Scannon's team spent 10 years looking for 453 -- acting on hunches and old battlefield reports.
But it wasn't until 2004 and a tip from a local fisherman that they finally found the wreckage.
Anderson Cooper: That's the tail section of the plane.
It was about a mile away from where they'd been searching all those years.
Dr.
Pat Scannon: A mile away underwater is -- you might as well be on the moon.
We spent years doing grid searches in the area that we thought it was.
Anderson Cooper: Just methodically square by square underwater? Dr.
Pat Scannon: Square by square underwater.
Because we knew it had to be here.
A B-24 is a big thing.
And you know, at least on the map, these waters don't look that big.
So how hard could it be? At least that's what we thought.
Well, it turns out it's hard.
We went to 453 to dive with Pat Scannon and his team, the site is now protected by the Palaun government.
Anderson Cooper: When you first enter the water, it's only a few seconds before you see the first signs of the plane.
The plane impacted and as it hit the water and that's why it's now laying in sections.
At first you might mistake it for coral, in fact coral has been growing over it.
And over here you can see the propeller.
Dr.
Pat Scannon: At the end of the game, it's not about finding aluminum.
It's not about finding wreck sites.
It's about finding the MIAs who are no longer MIA.
The remains of eight crew members were found at this site and later recovered and identified by the U.
S.
military.
One of the men was Jimmy Doyle, a 25-year-old Texan, who was 453's nose gunner.
You can still see the turret where he was sitting when the plane crashed and where his remains were found.
That diver, pausing in the spot, is Jimmy Doyle's grandson, Casey Doyle, an active duty Marine who now volunteers with the BentProp Project.
Casey Doyle: Just to know where the last few moments of his life were, is a very special time, and to see that down there, there's probably still a little physically, a little bit of him and the rest of the crew still down there, so it's an incredibly powerful and special place for me.
Until BentProp found the wreckage, Jimmie Doyle's family didn't talk much about him.
Some family members actually believed he survived the war and started a new life.
Anderson Cooper: What did people say about your grandfather? Casey Doyle: There's a whole generation of people in my family that just did not speak of this because of the unknown.
Dr.
Pat Scannon: You can tell a family that their loved one is missing or that their loved ones were captured and were POWs.
But I swear to goodness, I have talked to families who really believe that grandpa somehow made it out, was saved by the natives and had amnesia and was living on an island being taken care of by young native girls.
Anderson Cooper: And families really believe that? Dr.
Pat Scannon: I have heard it.
Anderson Cooper: Why would people think that? Dr.
Pat Scannon: I think it comes with the hope that someone missing may show up.
Jimmy Doyle finally returned home with seven of his crew members in 2010 -- 65 years after their plane was shot out of the sky.
A memorial was held in Arlington National Cemetery, where some of the men were buried.
Pat Scannon was invited to attend.
Anderson Cooper: What was that like to be at Arlington? Dr.
Pat Scannon: I was, I felt that my job on that plane was done.
And I actually stepped back and watched the ceremony from a ways off.
And it was extremely emotional.
Anderson Cooper: You're emotional just thinking about it? Dr.
Pat Scannon: Yeah.
It's, I think about it a lot, actually.
Anderson Cooper: What's the emotion for you? Dr.
Pat Scannon: Happiness.
That they know what happened.
But not everyone from 453 has come home.
Just after the plane was hit, three crew members parachuted out, including 22-year-old Art Schumacher.
All three were quickly captured by the Japanese, and according to witnesses, taken to a camp in the jungle and executed.
The BentProp team is still looking for their remains, but searching on land is no easier than in the ocean.
Pat Scannon has tried to pinpoint the location of the graves by traveling to Japan to interview former Japanese soldiers stationed in Palau.
And he's tracked down Palauans who say they saw the men just before they were captured.
Dr.
Pat Scannon: So you saw the parachutes? Man: Yeah.
Dr.
Pat Scannon: Do you know how many? Man: Well, I saw like three, I think.
One Palauan drew a map in the dirt showing where he believed the prisoners were executed.
Using that information, the BentProp team has identified two spots in the jungle where they think as many as a dozen Americans were killed.
We were with them when they started digging.
The red sticks are where buried pieces of metal were detected -- probably fragments of munitions, but perhaps a prisoner's button or zipper.
The chance of finding Art Schumacher and the others on the first dig may be small, but Schumacher's niece Jo has flown here from Washington.
Anderson Cooper: What would it mean to find your uncle? Jo: Well, gosh, we could bring him home.
We could bring him home to family.
And we can do a proper burial, we can honor them.
And they gave their lives for the country.
Scannon's team has found debris from at least In addition to the eight airmen recovered from 453, BentProp's other discoveries could lead to the return of 16 more MIAs from Palau.
But many planes crashed in far less accessible parts of the ocean and dense jungle and their crews never found.
Anderson Cooper: Do you know how many Americans are still missing here? Dr.
Pat Scannon: We think it's somewhere between The real question is how many crashed inside the barrier reef.
Inside the barrier reef means we can possibly find them.
Anderson Cooper: Why? Because outside Dr.
Pat Scannon: It's 2,000 feet deep.
In 2005, Scannon's team found this wing of a TBM Avenger in the jungle.
They believe the rest of the plane is in the water nearby and they've been searching for it the past nine years.
Dr.
Pat Scannon: We've never been able to find the fuselage, so somewhere out here there's a fuselage with, possibly, with two MIAs on it.
To find the Avenger, BentProp has now been joined by a team from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of Delaware.
They bring high technology to the hunt.
This research torpedo, called REMUS, can scan large areas of ocean with sonar.
Eric Terrill leads the effort.
Eric Terrill: We ran the REMUS a few hours off of the mangroves here and found a couple of targets.
Drop down.
Get some visuals on the targets.
Dr.
Pat Scannon: If there's a place it ought to be, it's right here.
Terrill leads the way with a handheld sonar device and is the first to come across debris, including part of the plane's tail.
When the sonar shows signs of something ahead, he turns around to get Pat Scannon.
Dr.
Pat Scannon: He comes swimming up to me, grabs my hand and practically yanks my arm off.
And so I figured he probably knows something.
And this gray hulk becomes an airplane.
And there's a big propeller right there.
You get misty, I got misty underwater.
You know, "Maybe this isn't such a good thing to do underwater, you know?" But, you know, I couldn't help it.
It was very emotional.
And when you put your finger on the plane, it's real.
And that's what we did.
Anderson Cooper: You touch it? Dr.
Pat Scannon: You touch it.
And Anderson Cooper: Why? Dr.
Pat Scannon: I don't know.
Science is about facts.
I mean, my eyes saw it, you know? I mean, so fact was it was there.
But touching it, you know, just gave it a sense of finality.
We all knew what this was.
And what it meant.
Anderson Cooper: There are Americans down there? Dr.
Pat Scannon: There are Americans down there.
The families don't even know yet.
And it's not that I'm wanting to keep a secret, but we also, until the remains are properly identified, we don't want to hold out false hope.
To get proper identification, BentProp notifies the U.
S.
military of the discovery, but the actual recovery and identification of remains by the military can take years.
Dr.
Pat Scannon: This plane was shot down over this area the 4th of May, 1945.
Every time BentProp finds wreckage of a plane with missing airmen, they hold a small ceremony.
They videotape it so that, one day, the families of the MIAs will know the respect shown to them by Scannon and his team, who spent their own time and money to find them.
Over the Avenger crash site this year, BentProp unfurls an American and a Palauan flag and speak of the men who were lost.
They say their names, their ages, what they've learned of their lives.
And at the end of every ceremony, Pat Scannon recites a poem written during World War I.
It's called "For the Fallen.
" Anderson Cooper: Would you read it to me? Dr.
Pat Scannon: Sure, I'll read it to you.
I can't read it without standing up.
Can I stand up? Anderson Cooper: Of course.
Dr.
Pat Scannon: So, "They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.
"
Our roads and bridges are crumbling, our airports are out of date and the vast majority of our seaports are in danger of becoming obsolete.
All the result of decades of neglect.
None of this is really in dispute.
Business leaders, labor unions, governors, mayors, congressmen and presidents have complained about a lack of funding for years, but aside from a one time cash infusion from the stimulus program, nothing much has changed.
There is still no consensus on how to solve the problem or where to get the massive amounts of money needed to fix it, just another example of political paralysis in Washington.
Tens of millions of American cross over bridges every day without giving it much thought, unless they hit a pothole.
But the infrastructure problem goes much deeper than pavement.
It goes to crumbling concrete and corroded steel and the fact that nearly 70,000 bridges in America -- one out of every nine -- is now considered to be structurally deficient.
Ray LaHood: Our infrastructure is on life support right now.
That's what we're on.
Few people are more aware of the situation than Ray LaHood, who was secretary of transportation during the first Obama administration, and before that a seven-term Republican congressman from Illinois.
He is currently co-chairman of Building America's Future, a bipartisan coalition of current and former elected officials that is urgently pushing for more spending on infrastructure.
Steve Kroft: According to the government, there are 70,000 bridges that have been deemed structurally deficient.
Ray LaHood: Yep.
Steve Kroft: What does that mean? Ray LaHood: It means that there are bridges that need to be really either replaced or repaired in a very dramatic way.
Steve Kroft: They're dangerous? Ray LaHood: I don't want to say they're unsafe.
But they're dangerous.
I would agree with that.
Steve Kroft: If you were going to take me someplace, any place in the country, to illustrate the problem, where would you take me? Ray LaHood: There is a lot of places we could go.
You could go to any major city in America and see roads, and bridges, and infrastructure that need to be fixed today.
They need to be fixed today.
We decided to start in Pittsburgh, which may have the most serious problem in the country.
Our guide was Andy Herrmann, a past president of the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Steve Kroft: From up here you can see why they call it the city of bridges.
Andy Herrmann: Yeah.
Between the highway and the railroad bridges.
There's many of them.
Steve Kroft: And most of them old.
Andy Herrmann: Most of them old.
They're nearing the end of their useful lives, yeah.
There are more than more than 4,000 bridges in metropolitan Pittsburgh and 20 percent of them are structurally deficient, including one of the city's main arteries.
Steve Kroft: This is the Liberty Bridge ahead? An important bridge for Pittsburgh.
Andy Herrmann: A very important bridge for Pittsburgh.
A connection from the south to the city itself, and then to the north.
It was built in 1928 when cars and trucks were much lighter.
It was designed to last in Pittsburgh five million people travel across bridges that either need to be replaced or undergo major repairs.
Andy Herrmann: One of these arch bridges actually has a structure built under it to catch falling deck.
See that structure underneath it? They actually built that to catch any of the falling concrete so it wouldn't hit traffic underneath it.
Steve Kroft: That's amazing.
Andy Herrmann: It all comes down to funding.
Right now they can't keep up with it.
Three hundred bridges become structurally deficient each year in the state of Pennsylvania.
That's one percent added to the already 23 percent they already have.
They just can't fix them fast enough.
Pennsylvania is one of the worst states in country when it comes to the condition of its infrastructure, and Philadelphia isn't any better off than Pittsburgh.
Nine million people a day travel over 900 bridges classified as structurally deficient, some of them on a heavily traveled section of I-95.
Ed Rendell is a former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania.
Steve Kroft: How critical is this stretch of I-95 to the country? Ed Rendell: It's a nation's number one highway.
Twenty-two miles of it goes through the city of Philadelphia.
There are 15 structurally deficient bridges in that 22-mile stretch.
And to fix them would cost seven billion dollars -- to fix all the roads and the structurally deficient bridges in that 22-mile stretch.
Rendell says no one knows where the money is going to come from and this stretch of I-95 has already had one brush with disaster.
In 2008 two contractors from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation stopped to get a sausage sandwich, and parked their cars under this bridge.
Ed Rendell: And fortunately they wanted that sausage sandwich because they saw one of these piers with an eight foot gash in it about five inches wide.
And oh, they knew automatically that this bridge was in deep trouble.
The section of I-95 was immediately shut down and blocked off while construction crews buttressed the column with steel girders.
It was closed for three days, creating havoc in Philadelphia.
But the city was lucky.
Ed Rendell: I mean, it was unbelievable.
It's so fortuitous.
Steve Kroft: And if they hadn't wanted a sausage sandwich? Ed Rendell: There's a strong likelihood that bridge would have collapsed.
These all are tragedies waiting to happen.
The I-95 bridges were built in the early 1960s and are now more than 50 years old.
The same vintage as the I-35 bridge that collapsed in Minnesota back in 2007, killing 13 people and injuring 145.
The antiquated Skagit River Bridge in Washington state that collapsed last May after a truck hit one of the trusses was even older.
And it's not just bridges.
According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, 32 percent of the major roads in America are now in poor condition and in need of major repairs.
Yet the major source of revenue -- the federal Highway Trust Fund, which gets its money from the federal gas tax of 18 cents a gallon -- is almost insolvent.
Former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood says it will go broke by next spring unless something is done.
Ray LaHood: That's the pot of money that over system in the world, which is now falling apart.
Steve Kroft: Why? How did it get this way? Ray LaHood: It's falling apart because we haven't made the investments.
We haven't got the money.
The last time we raised the gas tax, which is how we built the interstate system, was 1993.
Steve Kroft: What has the resistance been? Ray LaHood: Politicians in Washington don't have the political courage to say, "This is what we have to do.
" That's what it takes.
Steve Kroft: They don't want to spend the money? They don't want to raise the taxes? Ray LaHood: That's right.
They don't want to spend the money.
They don't want to raise the taxes.
They don't really have a vision of America the way that other Congresses have had a vision of America.
LaHood says public spending on infrastructure has fallen to its lowest level since 1947.
And the U.
S.
, which used to have the finest infrastructure in the world, is now ranked behind Iceland, Spain, Portugal and the United Arab Emirates.
It's a fact that's not been lost the most powerful economic and political lobbies in the country who believe the inaction threatens the country's economic future.
Big corporations like Caterpillar and GE say it's hurting their ability to compete abroad.
And at a Senate hearing earlier this year Tom Donohue, president of the generally conservative U.
S.
Chamber of Commerce voiced strong business support for raising the gas tax for the first time in 20 years.
[Tom Donohue: First, let's start by having some courage, and showing some leadership.
For once, let's do what's right, not what's politically expedient.
Second, let's educate the public and your fellow lawmakers.
.]
He was joined by Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, who said that every billion dollars spent on transportation infrastructure would create 35,000 well-paying jobs.
[Richard Trumka: If business and labor can come before you united on this issue -- and we are united on this issue despite our sharp disagreements on a variety of other matters -- I think that should tell everybody something and tell it very loudly.
.]
But it was not heard during the midterm elections where there was virtually no public debate on infrastructure and that has barely changed in the weeks that have followed.
We wanted to talk to Pennsylvania Congressman Bill Shuster, the chairman of the House Transportation Committee and made numerous requests over the last five months for an on-camera interview.
All of them were declined.
We did the same with Michigan Congressman Dave Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which has to come up with the money to fund transportation projects; we met with the same result.
But we did talk with one of the committee members, Earl Blumenauer, a nine-term Oregon Democrat.
He says the last time Congress passed a major six-year transportation bill was in 1997, since then there have been Rep.
Earl Blumenauer: I've actually been trying now for 44 months to at least get a hearing on transportation finance on the Highway Trust Fund that is slowly going bankrupt, and we've not had a single one.
Steve Kroft: Why can't you get a hearing? Rep.
Earl Blumenauer: It has, to this point, not raised to the level of priority for the Republican leadership.
Although, in fairness, when the Democrats were in charge we had a few hearings, but not much action.
Steve Kroft: So you see this as a bipartisan failure.
Rep.
Earl Blumenauer: Absolutely.
The Bush administration, they had two blue ribbon commissions about infrastructure finance that recommended a lot more money, and additionally the gas tax being increased.
We couldn't get them to accept being able to move forward.
Since President Obama's been in office, there has been, to be charitable, a lack of enthusiasm for raising the gas tax.
And the problems with transportation infrastructure go well beyond roads and bridges and the gas tax.
There's aviation.
A shortage of airports runways and gates along outmoded air traffic control systems have made U.
S.
air travel the most congested in the world.
And then there are seaports: when a new generation of big cargo ships begin going through an expanded Panama Canal in another year or so, only two of the 14 major ports on the East Coast will be dredged deep enough to accommodate them.
There are more than 14,000 miles of high-speed rail operating around the world, but none in the United States.
In Chicago, it can take a freight train nearly as long to go across the city, as it would for the same train to go from Chicago to Los Angeles.
But perhaps the most glaring example of neglect and inaction may be this sad little railroad bridge over the Hackensack River in New Jersey.
It was built 104 years ago and is, according to Amtrak President and CEO Joe Boardman, critical to the U.
S.
economy.
Joe Boardman: This is the Achilles heel that we have on the Northeast Corridor.
Steve Kroft: How much traffic goes over it every day? Joe Boardman: It's almost 500 trains a day.
It's the busiest bridge in the Western Hemisphere for train traffic, period.
Steve Kroft: And what kind of shape is it in? Joe Boardman: It's safe, Steve, but it's not reliable.
And it's getting less reliable.
It's old.
Its systems are breaking down.
There's an inability to make it work on a regular, reliable basis.
Boardman says the Portal Bridge is based on a design from the 1840s and was already obsolete shortly after it was completed in 1910.
It's a swing bridge that needs to be opened several times a week so barges can pass up and down the river.
It takes about a half an hour.
The problem is it fails to lock back into place on a regular basis.
Steve Kroft: And what kind of problems does that cause? Joe Boardman: It causes trains to stack up on both sides.
And actually, when a train stacks up here, it can stack up all the way down to Washington and all the way back up to Boston.
This is a single point of failure.
That's one of the biggest worries we have on this corridor is these single points of failure.
Amtrak's president says the bridge has to be replaced, the design work has already been completed, and the project, which would cost just under a billion dollars, is shovel ready.
Joe Boardman: If Congress wants to do something now, build this bridge.
It's ready to be done.
It's been ready for two years.
Build it.
It's tangible evidence that they can really get something done.
It's less a case of wanting to get something done, than coming up with the hundreds of billions of dollars needed to do it.
There is no shortage of ideas from Democrats or Republicans who've suggested everything from raising the gas tax to funding infrastructure through corporate tax reform.
But there is no consensus and not much political support for any of the alternatives as Andy Herrmann told us last summer, when we were flying over Pittsburgh.
Andy Herrmann: You're sitting there at these committee meetings; they seem to agree with you.
Yes, we have to make investments in infrastructure.
Yes, we have to do these things.
But then they come around and say, "Well, where are we going to get the money?" And you sort of sit to yourself and say to yourself, "Well, we elected you to figure that out.
" Some tragedies never end.
Ask people to name a nuclear disaster and most will probably point to Fukushima in Japan three years ago.
The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl in Ukraine was 30 years ago, but the crisis is still with us today.
That's because radiation virtually never dies.
After the explosion in 1986, the Soviets built a primitive sarcophagus, a tomb to cover the stricken reactor.
But it wasn't meant to last very long and it hasn't.
Engineers say there is still enough radioactive material in there to cause widespread contamination.
For the last five years a massive project has been underway to seal the reactor permanently.
But the undertaking is three quarters of a billion dollars short and the completion date has been delayed repeatedly.
Thirty years later, Chernobyl's crippled reactor still has the power to kill.
It's called the Zone and getting into it is crossing a border into one of the most contaminated places on Earth.
The 20-mile no man's land was evacuated nearly 30 years ago.
Drive to the center of the Zone today and you'll see a massive structure that appears to rise out of nowhere.
It's an engineering effort the likes of which the world has never seen.
With funds from over 40 different countries, 1,400 workers are building a giant arch to cover the damaged reactor like a casserole.
It will be taller than the Statue of Liberty and wider than Yankee Stadium -- the largest movable structure on Earth.
Nicholas Caille is overseeing the arch's construction.
Bob Simon: You know when you think about it, you have this massive project going on.
All these people working here.
Billions of dollars being spent because of one day 30 years ago.
Nicolas Caille: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right.
It was the biggest disaster of the nuclear industry, yes.
The disaster was sparked by massive explosions that tore the roof off of Chernobyl's reactor number four, spewing radioactive dust into the atmosphere.
The Soviets drafted over half a million troops to put out the fire and clear the nuclear debris.
Thousands got seriously ill from radiation exposure.
Today, three decades later, the cleanup continues.
But as this recent video shows, the reactor is still packed with poison: heaps of gnarled steel and concrete, pools of nuclear fuel that have hardened into a dense mass called the "elephant's foot.
" There's still so much radiation coming from the reactor that workers have to construct the arch nearly a thousand feet away, shielded by a massive concrete wall.
When finished, the arch will be slid into place around the Sarcophagus, then sealed up.
Nicolas Caille: We will push it in once, the average speed it will be around 10 meters an hour.
So it's approximately the speed of a snail.
Bob Simon: Right.
But that's pretty rapid considering the size of this thing.
Nicolas Caille: It is.
Yes, yes.
But the construction itself will have to move a lot quicker.
The old plant and sarcophagus are falling apart.
Just two years ago, a snow storm caused the roof of one of the buildings to collapse, forcing workers to be evacuated and raising fears of further contamination.
Radiation is not subject to the usual rules of life and death.
It is virtually eternal.
When Caille took us on a tour of the site, we were fitted with dosimeters to tell us how much we were being exposed to.
Suddenly, a sound we didn't want to hear.
Bob Simon: Hey, there's beepers going off.
Nicolas Caille: No, no.
It's not.
It's normal.
Bob Simon: You're sure? Nicolas Caille: Yes, yes, yes.
I'm definitively sure.
Bob Simon: I don't like a beeper in Chernobyl.
I don't like that sound.
Building the arch under these conditions is challenging enough.
But some of the biggest obstacles have nothing to do with radiation.
As violence gripped Ukraine this year, one of the arch's contractors backed out.
The project is also 770 million dollars short, and it has been plagued by repeated delays.
No matter when it's completed, vast stretches of the Zone will never recover.
This is the city of Pripyat, two miles from the reactor.
Thirty years ago, the population was 50,000.
Today it is zero.
Pripyat was where many of the plant's workers lived, grateful for their posting in a town that was the model of Soviet modernity.
Nine-story apartment buildings lined this boulevard.
They're still there, but you can't see them anymore.
The forest has taken over.
A vision perhaps of what the whole world might look like were people to just disappear.
It was springtime in Pripyat that day in 1986, and an amusement park was due to open in a few days.
Andre Glukhov lived here then.
Bob Simon: So, that Ferris wheel never had any kids in it? Andrey Glukhov: Never had any kids.
These bumper cars, on your left, had never kids on it, too.
Bob Simon: When you talk to your former neighbors, what do you call it? The accident? the catastrophe? Andrey Glukhov: We just call it 26, which was the date of the accident.
Bob Simon: Twenty-six? Andrey Glukhov: Twenty-sixth of April.
Bob Simon: Sort of like the Americans call Andrey Glukhov: Exactly.
Back then, Glukhov worked for Chernobyl's nuclear safety division.
He took us on a tour through a part of the plant that had not been destroyed.
He was off duty that night, but what he saw when he drove past the damaged reactor was like nothing he, or anyone else, had ever seen.
[Andrey Glukhov: This is the control room.]
Andrey Glukhov: This was a terrifying picture.
It looked like a sunset in the distance, about glowing core of the reactor.
Bob Simon: That was the first and the only time you saw it? Andrey Glukhov: No, that was the first time when I realized the scale of the disaster.
Glukhov told his family in Pripyat to stay inside and close the windows.
Soviet authorities covered the area with secrecy, told people they had nothing to worry about.
But 36 hours later, over a thousand busses were sent in to evacuate everyone.
Authorities told people it would only be for three days -- one of many lies.
The people never came back, and Pripyat is being overwhelmed by the elements.
One of the only things still recognizable is that old Soviet iconography.
Drive through the Zone, and you'll find that many villages suffered the same fate as Pripyat.
A row of simple markers has been planted with the names of each one.
But amidst this wilderness, the strangest sight of all.
People, just a few.
Ivan Ivanovitch and his wife Maria were evacuated to an apartment block near Kiev after the accident, but couldn't take it.
They weren't made for the city, so two years later, they came back.
Today, there are three other people living in this village just a few miles from the old power plant.
Bob Simon: When you decided to come back to live here, did anyone tell you it was dangerous? Ivan Ivanovitch: It's really OK here.
You know, when I lived in that apartment block, I got sick all the time.
But when I came back here, I was fine.
And I've been fine ever since.
Bob Simon: You should never leave home.
Ivan Ivanovitch: I would be long gone if I'd stayed there.
I'd be in the ground.
Despite the danger, Tim Mousseau also chose to be here.
For the last 15 years, the University of South Carolina biologist has been studying the contamination's impact from a makeshift lab inside the Zone.
Bob Simon: Aren't many serious labs I've seen that look like this.
Tim Mousseau: Yeah this is an opportunistic lab.
It's an old villager's house.
Mousseau's research has shown that the catastrophe continues to take its toll.
Tim Mousseau: And we're going to attempt to measure just how radioactive these mice are.
Bob Simon: What's the comparison between the amounts of radiation a mouse would have here and a mouse somewhere else? Tim Mousseau: Some of these mice have on the order of 10,000 times more radioactivity in their bodies than in clean areas.
The human toll has been profound as well.
Thyroid cancer and leukemia affected thousands -- though the exact number of deaths is still being debated.
Tim Mousseau: There certainly is evidence that some of the genetic damage that occurs at the level of the DNA can be transmitted from one generation to the next.
Bob Simon: So a nuclear disaster is never over? Tim Mousseau: There will be areas that will be contaminated for thousands, if not millions, of years.
This makes the Zone like no other place on Earth, which is why it's attracting tourists.
If you've done Paris and Rome, why not try a holiday in hell.
Check out the apocalypse? Bob Simon: How did your friends react when you told them you were coming on vacation to Chernobyl? David McHale: They thought it was very strange, you know.
But, I mean, people have been coming here for a while, so you know, I guess it must be safe.
Bob Simon: You guess it must be safe.
What makes you believe it's safe? David McHale: Well, you know, I would assume that the guides wouldn't bring people here if it wasn't safe.
Bob Simon: All right, well, I hope you're right.
David McHale: So do I.
Thousands of workers flood into the Zone every day, to look after what remains of the plant.
Others live here year-round, in one of the few places safe enough for inhabitants: the town of Chernobyl itself.
Yevgen Goncharenko was our guide.
He lives here too.
Bob Simon: Why are you living here and not in Kiev? Yevgen Goncharenko: Because I like this place.
For me and it's very interesting maybe even sacred place for me.
Bob Simon: A sacred place? Yevgen Goncharenko: For me, yeah.
He spends much of his time writing music on his bass guitar.
Music as desolate as the landscape surrounding him.
As desolate as the remains of this empire that has long since disappeared.
A decade after the disaster, workers here built a monument honoring their colleagues whose lives had been destroyed.
Bob Simon: The workers and the firemen made the monument themselves? Yevgen Goncharenko: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Bob Simon: And what does it say? Yevgen Goncharenko: "To those who saved the world.
" Bob Simon: "To those who saved the world.
" That may sound a bit hyperbolic.
But when the reactor exploded in 1986, radioactive dust and debris were carried as far away as Italy and Sweden.
Until the arch finally seals up that stricken reactor, and no one knows when that might be, something like that could happen again.
Unlike other historic relics, Chernobyl does not belong to the past; its power will never die.
Chernobyl is forever.
More than 400,000 Americans died fighting in the Second World War.
Adding to the heartache of that staggering loss, nearly one in five of those killed was declared missing in action.
To this day, the families of some 73,000 unaccounted for servicemen have lived with the mystery of how they died and have been deprived of the comfort that comes from a burial.
At the end of the war, the technology didn't exist to find and identify many of the missing, but today it does.
This is the remarkable story of a group of volunteers who spend their own time and money quietly searching for these long lost servicemen -- remarkable because of what they've discovered in recent years.
They are doing it, they say, for the fallen and their families.
And focus on Palau, a Pacific island nation that saw some of the fiercest fighting of the war 70 years ago, a place some pilots called "a forgotten corner of hell.
" Fly today over Palau's 586 small islands and miles of barrier reefs and you'll see no sign of the carnage that once occurred here.
But beneath the jungle canopy you can still find the rusted ruins of Japanese anti-aircraft guns; and in the clear blue water, a graveyard of planes and the men who flew them.
As the Second World War raged in the Pacific, the islands of Palau were teeming with Japanese soldiers and under attack by American planes.
The skies overhead were filled with Hellcats, Corsairs, Avengers and B-24 Liberators.
On September 1, 1944, this B-24, number 453, and its crew took off on a bombing mission.
[Announcer: A Liberator is hit!.]
out of the sky and disappeared into the sea.
It was one of more than 200 American planes lost over Palau during the war.
[Announcer: Our Pacific island warfare is not cheap.
.]
Dr.
Pat Scannon: This was a tough place.
This was no pushover.
There was as much anti-aircraft fire available in this part of the Pacific as anything that was over Tokyo.
Today, Dr.
Pat Scannon leads a group of volunteers that look for the wreckage of American warplanes and the missing airmen who flew them, including the BentProp Project.
Many have military backgrounds.
With permission from the Palaun government, they come every year, paying their own expenses, to search in the sea and on land.
[Dr.
Pat Scannon: I think that's what took my breath away when I saw that star and bar.
.]
When Scannon's team finds the remains of Americans, they inform the U.
S.
military, whose job it is to recover and identify the missing airmen.
It all started when Scannon was vacationing in Palau 20 years ago and came across the wing of a B-24 with its propeller sticking out of the water at low tide.
The bent prop gave the group its name.
Anderson Cooper: Did it surprise you that it was still there? Dr.
Pat Scannon: Oh absolutely.
Anderson Cooper: That moment you saw that, what did you think? Dr.
Pat Scannon: I think somebody died there.
The wing and engine of the B-24 Scannon found in 1993 are still here -- the propeller undisturbed in a few feet of water.
Scannon says he hasn't been the same since he first found it.
Dr.
Pat Scannon: It was one of those special moments in life where from one step to the next I knew I had to know what went on.
It just was wrong to me that this wing is sitting here and nobody knows anything about it.
Finding the answers rarely comes easily or quickly.
Scannon's team spent 10 years looking for 453 -- acting on hunches and old battlefield reports.
But it wasn't until 2004 and a tip from a local fisherman that they finally found the wreckage.
Anderson Cooper: That's the tail section of the plane.
It was about a mile away from where they'd been searching all those years.
Dr.
Pat Scannon: A mile away underwater is -- you might as well be on the moon.
We spent years doing grid searches in the area that we thought it was.
Anderson Cooper: Just methodically square by square underwater? Dr.
Pat Scannon: Square by square underwater.
Because we knew it had to be here.
A B-24 is a big thing.
And you know, at least on the map, these waters don't look that big.
So how hard could it be? At least that's what we thought.
Well, it turns out it's hard.
We went to 453 to dive with Pat Scannon and his team, the site is now protected by the Palaun government.
Anderson Cooper: When you first enter the water, it's only a few seconds before you see the first signs of the plane.
The plane impacted and as it hit the water and that's why it's now laying in sections.
At first you might mistake it for coral, in fact coral has been growing over it.
And over here you can see the propeller.
Dr.
Pat Scannon: At the end of the game, it's not about finding aluminum.
It's not about finding wreck sites.
It's about finding the MIAs who are no longer MIA.
The remains of eight crew members were found at this site and later recovered and identified by the U.
S.
military.
One of the men was Jimmy Doyle, a 25-year-old Texan, who was 453's nose gunner.
You can still see the turret where he was sitting when the plane crashed and where his remains were found.
That diver, pausing in the spot, is Jimmy Doyle's grandson, Casey Doyle, an active duty Marine who now volunteers with the BentProp Project.
Casey Doyle: Just to know where the last few moments of his life were, is a very special time, and to see that down there, there's probably still a little physically, a little bit of him and the rest of the crew still down there, so it's an incredibly powerful and special place for me.
Until BentProp found the wreckage, Jimmie Doyle's family didn't talk much about him.
Some family members actually believed he survived the war and started a new life.
Anderson Cooper: What did people say about your grandfather? Casey Doyle: There's a whole generation of people in my family that just did not speak of this because of the unknown.
Dr.
Pat Scannon: You can tell a family that their loved one is missing or that their loved ones were captured and were POWs.
But I swear to goodness, I have talked to families who really believe that grandpa somehow made it out, was saved by the natives and had amnesia and was living on an island being taken care of by young native girls.
Anderson Cooper: And families really believe that? Dr.
Pat Scannon: I have heard it.
Anderson Cooper: Why would people think that? Dr.
Pat Scannon: I think it comes with the hope that someone missing may show up.
Jimmy Doyle finally returned home with seven of his crew members in 2010 -- 65 years after their plane was shot out of the sky.
A memorial was held in Arlington National Cemetery, where some of the men were buried.
Pat Scannon was invited to attend.
Anderson Cooper: What was that like to be at Arlington? Dr.
Pat Scannon: I was, I felt that my job on that plane was done.
And I actually stepped back and watched the ceremony from a ways off.
And it was extremely emotional.
Anderson Cooper: You're emotional just thinking about it? Dr.
Pat Scannon: Yeah.
It's, I think about it a lot, actually.
Anderson Cooper: What's the emotion for you? Dr.
Pat Scannon: Happiness.
That they know what happened.
But not everyone from 453 has come home.
Just after the plane was hit, three crew members parachuted out, including 22-year-old Art Schumacher.
All three were quickly captured by the Japanese, and according to witnesses, taken to a camp in the jungle and executed.
The BentProp team is still looking for their remains, but searching on land is no easier than in the ocean.
Pat Scannon has tried to pinpoint the location of the graves by traveling to Japan to interview former Japanese soldiers stationed in Palau.
And he's tracked down Palauans who say they saw the men just before they were captured.
Dr.
Pat Scannon: So you saw the parachutes? Man: Yeah.
Dr.
Pat Scannon: Do you know how many? Man: Well, I saw like three, I think.
One Palauan drew a map in the dirt showing where he believed the prisoners were executed.
Using that information, the BentProp team has identified two spots in the jungle where they think as many as a dozen Americans were killed.
We were with them when they started digging.
The red sticks are where buried pieces of metal were detected -- probably fragments of munitions, but perhaps a prisoner's button or zipper.
The chance of finding Art Schumacher and the others on the first dig may be small, but Schumacher's niece Jo has flown here from Washington.
Anderson Cooper: What would it mean to find your uncle? Jo: Well, gosh, we could bring him home.
We could bring him home to family.
And we can do a proper burial, we can honor them.
And they gave their lives for the country.
Scannon's team has found debris from at least In addition to the eight airmen recovered from 453, BentProp's other discoveries could lead to the return of 16 more MIAs from Palau.
But many planes crashed in far less accessible parts of the ocean and dense jungle and their crews never found.
Anderson Cooper: Do you know how many Americans are still missing here? Dr.
Pat Scannon: We think it's somewhere between The real question is how many crashed inside the barrier reef.
Inside the barrier reef means we can possibly find them.
Anderson Cooper: Why? Because outside Dr.
Pat Scannon: It's 2,000 feet deep.
In 2005, Scannon's team found this wing of a TBM Avenger in the jungle.
They believe the rest of the plane is in the water nearby and they've been searching for it the past nine years.
Dr.
Pat Scannon: We've never been able to find the fuselage, so somewhere out here there's a fuselage with, possibly, with two MIAs on it.
To find the Avenger, BentProp has now been joined by a team from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of Delaware.
They bring high technology to the hunt.
This research torpedo, called REMUS, can scan large areas of ocean with sonar.
Eric Terrill leads the effort.
Eric Terrill: We ran the REMUS a few hours off of the mangroves here and found a couple of targets.
Drop down.
Get some visuals on the targets.
Dr.
Pat Scannon: If there's a place it ought to be, it's right here.
Terrill leads the way with a handheld sonar device and is the first to come across debris, including part of the plane's tail.
When the sonar shows signs of something ahead, he turns around to get Pat Scannon.
Dr.
Pat Scannon: He comes swimming up to me, grabs my hand and practically yanks my arm off.
And so I figured he probably knows something.
And this gray hulk becomes an airplane.
And there's a big propeller right there.
You get misty, I got misty underwater.
You know, "Maybe this isn't such a good thing to do underwater, you know?" But, you know, I couldn't help it.
It was very emotional.
And when you put your finger on the plane, it's real.
And that's what we did.
Anderson Cooper: You touch it? Dr.
Pat Scannon: You touch it.
And Anderson Cooper: Why? Dr.
Pat Scannon: I don't know.
Science is about facts.
I mean, my eyes saw it, you know? I mean, so fact was it was there.
But touching it, you know, just gave it a sense of finality.
We all knew what this was.
And what it meant.
Anderson Cooper: There are Americans down there? Dr.
Pat Scannon: There are Americans down there.
The families don't even know yet.
And it's not that I'm wanting to keep a secret, but we also, until the remains are properly identified, we don't want to hold out false hope.
To get proper identification, BentProp notifies the U.
S.
military of the discovery, but the actual recovery and identification of remains by the military can take years.
Dr.
Pat Scannon: This plane was shot down over this area the 4th of May, 1945.
Every time BentProp finds wreckage of a plane with missing airmen, they hold a small ceremony.
They videotape it so that, one day, the families of the MIAs will know the respect shown to them by Scannon and his team, who spent their own time and money to find them.
Over the Avenger crash site this year, BentProp unfurls an American and a Palauan flag and speak of the men who were lost.
They say their names, their ages, what they've learned of their lives.
And at the end of every ceremony, Pat Scannon recites a poem written during World War I.
It's called "For the Fallen.
" Anderson Cooper: Would you read it to me? Dr.
Pat Scannon: Sure, I'll read it to you.
I can't read it without standing up.
Can I stand up? Anderson Cooper: Of course.
Dr.
Pat Scannon: So, "They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.
"