Grade levels: Senior High (10-12)

Named “Best Amusement Park in the World” for 13 years straight by Amusement Today – the world’s authority on amusement parks – Cedar Point boasts a world-record 73 rides, including 16 rollercoasters! On peak days, 40,000 adrenalin-seeking junkies visit this iconic Ohio park, piling onto coasters, zipping down waterslides and enjoying the stunning waterfront setting. What fun-seekers don’t get to see is the massive, coordinated, behind-the-scenes effort by 2000 employees to ensure the gut-wrenching drops and scream-inducing thrills are safe, secure and as exhilarating as ever. Head of Operations Bill Spehn acts as a roving nerve center – weighing in on any problems that arise. From parking lot traffic jams, midday coaster breakdowns and staff shortages – this is the man who must come up with a solution for every problem…and fast. With only a six-month operating season, any daily slowdown in business could equal serious revenue loss.

Legal Sea Foods in Boston is a 45 year old seafood empire that takes the freshness and safety of your food to a whole new level! They source, test and prepare 50,000 kilograms of highly perishable seafood every week – exclusively serving the company’s 31 high-volume restaurants. Legal Sea Foods’ reputation for serving the best, freshest, safest food is always on the line. Seafood is easily susceptible to contamination. And in the restaurant business, one bad meal or one bad mollusk, could ruin even the hardest earned reputations. Nerve Center has complete, behind-the-scenes access to the newest addition to the Legal Empire, Legal Harborside. Located in beautiful downtown Boston, Legal Harborside is a 1,900 square meter restaurant featuring 3 kitchens, and capable of serving 300 people at a time. We follow the Legal team during their busy summer season to discover how one of the biggest seafood restaurants in the US pulls off the task of keeping 2500 diners a night satisfied, while keeping the 50 cooks and 7 chefs sane and the food delicious and fresh.

For six days in January the barren desert outside Scottsdale, Arizona becomes the site of one of the world’s biggest automobile events of the year – the Barrett-Jackson Collector Car Auction. 300,000 people from around the globe gather under a 8 hectare tented city to watch 3000 bidders vying for 1300 of the world’s most exotic and expensive used cars. The stakes –$100 million dollars. With 40 hours of live auction broadcast on SPEED network, it takes a team of 800 people from Barrett-Jackson working day and night behind-the-scenes to pull off this iconic event. Barrett-Jackson gets a percentage of each sale, so selling each car for the best price is the name of the game. President Steve Davis estimates the price ahead of the auction. A world expert on collector cars, he analyzes a database with 40 years of auction sales, identifying all transactions on similar makes and models. He boasts that he can accurately determine within 5% what any car will sell for at the auction. Then it’s up to the auctioneers to get that price!

Equivalent in size to the kingdom of Monaco, nearly half of the blooms that make up the 40 billion dollar a year flower industry will be bought and sold at the Aalsmeer Flower Auction. Located southwest of Amsterdam, every day highly perishable imports arrive from around the globe, only to be shipped out less than 24 hours later. In the lead up to Valentine’s Day, this logistics hub will be stretched to its very limit as thousands of people work tirelessly to receive, care for and distribute almost 50% more flora than usual (including more than 100 million roses!)

Boasting the biggest vertical drop in North America and with over 32 square kilometers (8000 acres) of mountainous terrain, Whistler Blackcomb is one of the best places in the world to ski and snowboard. The numbers speak for themselves: over 200 trails, 5 parks, 1 super pipe, 1 snow cross track, 37 lifts that can move 69,680 skiers per hour, 17 mountain restaurants and a ski season that stretches from November to late May/early June. With an average of 1092 cm of snowfall a season, the fresh powder is what joy riders are after, but this much snow can also be deadly. A team of 5000 work 24/7 to keep them safe.

The Rogers Center is gearing up for fifty three thousand attendees and 8 million viewers tuning into one of the most exciting sporting events in North America – the 100th Grey Cup on TSN. While all eyes are focused on the football plays and the half-time show, what people don’t see is the amazing technology, coordination and talent that work tirelessly behind-the-scenes to prepare for and pull off the live broadcast of this multi-million dollar event. In the high adrenalin world of live event broadcasting, there are no second chances. Deadlines can’t be missed and decisions are split second. It takes more than 200 skilled technicians six days to convert 1.6 million cubic meters inside the Rogers Centre into a full HD, live television broadcast studio. Using ten kilometers of camera cable, crews connect 37 cameras and more than 150 microphones to capture the plays and the sound inside the dome.

Soaring 55 storeys above Toronto’s city skyline, the brand-new Four Seasons Hotel stands as a cutting-edge flagship for the iconic chain when it opened in early October 2012. Competition is stiff in Toronto with the recent launch of the 5-star Ritz-Carlton and the Trump International Hotel – and the Four Seasons’ global reputation rides on the flawless opening of this high-profile home base. The pressure is intense and the hotel’s 400 staff members feel the heat! Nerve Center had unparalleled behind the scenes access to the one of the most highly anticipated hotel launches in the history of the company.

One of the most technically astounding live shows in the world, Cirque du Soleil’s “KA” opened in 2005 at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas. The main stage is the star acrobat of the show – it can raise 70 feet, tilt from horizontal to vertical and spin a full 360-degrees thanks to its muscle – an 80-foot gantry crane. All of the performers’ movements are choreographed to be perfectly in-sync with the movement of the stage.

Best known for its trademark brown trucks, vans, and scooters, UPS delivers almost sixteen million packages in 220 countries around the globe every day. The company also boasts one of the world’s largest plane fleets – 223 aircraft. Worldport, UPS’ main airhub, is home base for that fleet – almost half of all UPS’s air deliveries fly through here. Upon arrival, parcels are unloaded, scanned, sorted by size and location and then flown out of the facility – all within the hour.

Over a century in the making, the Chunnel is the longest undersea rail tunnel in the world. After eight years of leading edge construction, the Eurotunnel project rang in at a cost $21 billion dollars. Considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World, the Chunnel is a marvel of modern engineering and one of the most important rail systems in the world. Every hour multiple trains travel through the Chunnel’s 50-kilometer expanse; crossing the English Channel in just 33 minutes. With a departure once every ten minutes, any system breakdown could severely disrupt cross-channel traffic, affecting up to a hundred thousand people and costing Eurotunnel millions.