A surprise box-office hit of the Easter holiday weekend was a pair of disaster films posted by the Washington State Dept. of Transportation to the Internet video site YouTube.

The videos, which went live on April 6, had 87,000 hits by 9 a.m, on April 9, says proj-ect director John Milton. They show simulations of the failure of the 44-year-old State Route 520 crossing over Washington Lake, east of Seattle, under two scenarios engineers say it is vulnerable to: high winds and earthquake. The state is developing an environmental impact statement for the replacement of the combination of floating and fixed segments. It also is trying to raise $4.38 billion for the project.

WSDOT spent $21,000 on the simulations, which are based on engineering analysis and built upon In-Roads 2004 and Microstation V8 design files, rendered in Autodesk’s 3D StudioMax.

sYouTube has been great. It has gotten the information to people much quicker and in a much easier format," says Milton. Other simulations posted by WSDOT on its site and other outlets such as television stations and newspapers have gotten many hits, but it is much more difficult to track because they each have their own address. With YouTube, other Websites can offer the video by hidden links, leaving it on a single site.