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Did you know that The United States was not the first country to consider digging a canal across The Isthmus of Panama? I didn’t. I thought the canal was the ambitious brainchild of Teddy Roosevelt.
Nope.
In 1534, Charles I of Spain ordered the first survey of a proposed canal through the Isthmus of Panama.
Then, from 1880 to 1900, the French tried their hand at building the canal, but the project failed miserably due to health issues, economic woes, and engineering problems. The French lost over 20,000 lives in their 20 years of attempting to dig the big ditch, mostly because of malaria outbreaks.
Panama won its independence from Colombia in 1903. In 1904, the Panamanian Government signed a treaty with The United States in which the U.S. guaranteed Panama’s independence and paid her ten million dollars.
With Teddy Roosevelt as the driving force, the U.S. bought the rights to build the canal from The French Canal Company for forty million dollars. Construction on the canal began in 1911. It was completed in 1914 to the tune of 387 million dollars.
To cut down on the malaria-carrying mosquitoes, swamps and stagnant water pools were sprayed with diesel oil to stop the deadly little critters from breeding. Quinine was also discovered to be a treatment for the dreaded disease. By the time the canal was completed in 1914, a little over 5000 additional lives were lost to industrial accidents and disease.
Panama was chosen as the canal site, even though Costa Rica is a narrower country with borders on the Atlantic Ocean (Caribbean Sea) and the Pacific Ocean. However, Costa Rica is much more mountainous than Panama, and it would have required the moving of a lot more earth to put the canal there.
As it was, 152.9 million cubic meters of earth were removed. If this material was placed on flatbed railroad cars, that train would circle the globe four times!
There are three sets of locks on the Atlantic side and three on the Pacific side of the canal. A ship enters a lock, which is like a huge holding pen. The gigantic, 25-foot-high, 40-ton metal doors then swing shut behind it.( Think of that! These 40-ton behemoths swing in the breeze, and I've got doors in my house that I can't budge!) Then, the lock begins to fill with 197 million liters of fresh water from Gatun Lake, which is the second-largest man-made lake in the world. (Lake Meade in Colorado is the largest.)
Each lock is 33.5 meters wide and 305 meters long.
When the lock is full of water, the lock gates facing the bow of the ship open, and the vessel enters the next lock. The procedure repeats itself until the vessel is lifted 26 meters above sea level to the level of Gatun Lake. Once it reaches that level, the vessel moves out on giant Gatun Lake until it reaches the cut on the other side and has to go through the lock system once again in order to drop down to the ocean sea level.
The entire trip, from ocean to ocean, is approximately 80 kilometers long and takes between 8 to 10 hours to complete. (Using The Panama Canal, a ship traveling from New York to San Francisco can save over 7800 miles.)
The canal was widened once along the 12.6 kilometer Culebra Cut, which is the strip that connects the Pacific Ocean to Gatun Lake. It was widened from 91 meters to 152 meters, and the project took 16 years to complete (1954 – 1970).
A new set of three-steps are now under construction at the entrances of the canal on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. This project will be completed by 2014, and will double the capacity of the canal. The estimated cost is $5.25 billion. Without these new locks, the canal will surpass it maximum sustainable capacity somewhere between 2009 and 2012.
The U.S., under the direction of Jimmy Carter, signed the Panama Canal over to the Panamanian Government on December 31, 1999.
Since the Panama Canal first opened for business in 1914, over 942,000 vessels have passed through its locks.
As we sailed through the canal, I couldn’t help but marvel at the mind of Man. For better or for worse, we are the only creatures on the earth that alter our environment to suit our needs. All other species adapt to their environment or move to another, more suitable one.
Who has dreams like this? What kind of minds have the audacity to think that they can successfully pull off these monumental tasks?
As we moved along through the locks and man-made cuts of The Panama Canal, the old Frank Sinatra song about the ant moving the rubber tree plant came to my mind.
High hopes.
Absolutely amazing!
