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First came the French. A union led by Ferdinand de Lesseps, the diplomat who had directed the construction of the Suez Canal, began digging a canal through Central America in 1881. Attracting huge contingents of Afro-Caribbean workers, the labor force peaked at 40,000 in 1888. With roughly 10 feet of rain annually, the constant rains caused constant retreat in the mudflat region. Malaria and yellow fever killed about 22,000. Waste and corruption among many contractors and suppliers hampered the effort. The bankruptcy of 1889 caused 800,000 French investors, mostly middle class, to lose their holdings.
In the 1890s, American business figures and officials became interested in developing an Atlantic-Pacific canal, most favoring a Nicaraguan route. After much wrangling, Congress established a route in 1902 for what would become the nation of Panama, agreeing to pay $40 million to buy the French assets: the Canal Zone concession; the Panama Railroad in operation, vital for construction; and more than 2,000 buildings plus construction machinery.
President Theodore Roosevelt took office in 1901 and galvanized the canal effort. He chose Colonel William Gorgas, the leading tropical disease doctor in the US, to oversee the hospitals and health work. But project leaders rejected Gorgas’ insistence that strict health measures must be implemented before construction expanded. However, Gorgas proceeded in 1904 to wage war on mosquitoes, having recently been identified as transmitters of yellow fever. He trained inspectors to visit every house in the nearby city of Colon to make sure that every well, cistern, and water jar was covered, and that every pocket of standing water in the open air was coated with oil or kerosene.
The U.S. effort to build the Panama Canal benefited from efforts previously abandoned by the French and a concerted attempt by project leaders to eradicate yellow fever in the canal. Data from the ENR file
As ENR’s editorial endorsement dryly put it, “The best that skill and money can do to improve sanitary conditions and reduce the risk of epidemics will be well spent, not only from a humanitarian point of view, but because of a definite reduction in the total cost of construction.”
Despite their efforts, project leaders did not take Gorgas seriously, and a 1905 outbreak of yellow fever in the canal’s administration building spurred three-quarters of the Americans to return home. A single longshoreman died of bubonic plague, which led to hundreds of rat traps being set, poison put out, and barracks and ships fumigated.
Chief engineer John Wallace had let the canal work progress slowly with the inherited French equipment. Workers often did not have the right tools: the railroad spikes were driven with axes. Secretary of War William Howard Taft, who was in charge of the overall canal effort, summoned Wallace and fired him. A year later, the US channel effort was a disorganized disaster.
Wallace’s successor in 1905, John Stevens, was a hardened railroad engineer. He stopped work on the Culebra section of the canal for a total reorganization. To alleviate the housing shortage, he had entire communities built: houses, shacks, canteens, hospitals, schools, and sewage systems. Stevens also gave Gorgas carte blanche to fight diseases. Soon Gorgas had 4,000 men working on yellow fever eradication efforts: setting up screening, spraying insecticide, and applying antiseptics such as carbolic acid. Within 18 months they had it under control, eliminating the disease fears that had made it difficult to recruit American workers.
Wikimedia commons photo by HC White Co., source: US Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, originally published by Jahoe and available in the public domain under the CC Public Domain Mark 1.0 license
Stevens saw the Panama Railroad as the key. In addition to transporting workers, food, and supplies, he had to haul massive amounts of booty from the Culebra Cut, a 300-foot-high ridge that will be cut into a nine-mile-long canyon. He replaced the old French rails with heavier tracks and ordered a fleet of massive locomotives, dump wagons and 95-ton Bucyrus steam shovels.
US workers were recruited for administrative and clerical work and for skilled trades. To reduce turnover, married men were encouraged to bring their wives and children and were given houses with modern plumbing free of charge. A community was formed, with commissaries supplying American food while churches and schools were established. Soon there were 6,000 Americans, including 2,500 women and children.
The vast majority of the workforce led a harsher existence. The largest contingent of shovel workers were 20,000 men from Barbados. Martinique and Guadeloupe supplied 7,500 workers and Stevens recruited 8,000 Basques. Day laborers dug ditches, cut brush, hauled lumber, unloaded boxes of dynamite, and loaded cement. By the end of 1906, this workforce had reached 24,000.
Initially, workers were assigned tents and fed in canteens where they found poor food. Dining halls, living quarters and hospitals were all separate. Most ended up leaving the camps and renting rooms in the slums of Colón or Panama City. Many built their own huts in the forest. Black workers, who endured inferior living conditions and more dangerous tasks, had a death rate four times that of whites. Although yellow fever had been defeated, many workers succumbed to pneumonia, typhoid fever and various intestinal diseases. The canal authorities made no provisions for the thousands of maimed workers.
The Culebra Cut was the intimidating challenge. The French effort had excavated 78 million cubic meters of earth and rock, but only 30 million cubic meters of this was within the canal’s final route. Stevens’ plan of attack was similar to surface mining: laying sets of parallel tracks at various levels along the sloping sides of the cut. Rail-mounted steam shovels on the uphill chewed up the grade and deposited the debris on the waiting flat cars on the downhill. Trains of empty cars ran like a gigantic conveyor belt.
Although it had long been planned as a sea-level canal similar to the Suez Canal, some engineers who studied the route argued that landslides and violent flooding of the Chagres River presented hazards, and that ships traveling at higher speeds in excavated canals were more likely to run aground than in a lock-and-dam system. After much study and dispute, the lock-and-dam vision won, passed by the Senate in a closed vote in 1907.
Within two years Stevens had stabilized and reorganized the project, making notable improvements in housing, health and supplies, mobilizing both men and machinery. He resigned suddenly in 1907 without giving any reason. Roosevelt quickly appointed George Goethals, a prominent US Army Corps of Engineer, as chief engineer, giving him near-dictatorial authority to eliminate bureaucratic headaches. He was cold and strict. Early in his tenure, the steam shovel engineers threatened to strike and walk off the job. Goethals fired them and hired new teams. He treated the workers humanely, devoting Sunday mornings to listening to workers’ complaints on a first-come, first-served basis.
Figure from the ENR file.
By 1909 there were 68 steam shovels working the cut, 500 trainloads of booty were hauled away a day and the workforce had grown to 44,000. Three hundred drillers were working with dynamite equipment placing 800,000 sticks of dynamite into holes each month. The 76 miles of back-to-back tracks within the cut had to be repeatedly relocated as excavation progressed. Drilling, jacking, shoveling, earth hauling and track moving had to be coordinated. Much of the spoil was used to build embankments or the 3.3-mile-long Naos Island breakwater that protected the channel’s entrance from the Pacific Ocean.
The design of the lock and dam meant that the Gatun Dam had to sit lower and grow in size: 115 feet high and 7,700 feet long. It would create the world’s largest artificial lake, Lake Gatún, flooding 166 square miles and displacing 40,000 Panamanians. The lack of bedrock at the dam site raised concerns, but it was ultimately deemed safe. The dam has an impermeable blue clay core and its volume of 22 million cubic meters made it the largest earthen dam in the world.
The six pairs of locks were and are imposing monoliths: 110 feet wide, 1,000 feet long, with the highest chambers 81 feet. They were built by pouring concrete from cable cars into large shapes. Inside the side walls, tunnels 18 feet in diameter carried the water used to fill the locks. The steel lock gates were the largest ever erected: 65 feet wide, 47 to 80 feet high, and 7 feet thick. Fifty mills, foundries, and specialty manufacturers in Pittsburgh supplied most of the lock’s components.
Landslides were a common threat. The Cucaracha slide in 1907 saw 50 acres of slope slide down over 10 days. The 500,000 cubic meters of mud poured into the canal buried train tracks and two steam vanes.
The Panama Canal opened in 1914, reconnecting world trade. A decade of American efforts had excavated 232 million cubic meters of material. But it came at a high cost, with 5,609 workers dying from disease and accidents.
