Panama fever (63 page)

Aside from distractions, the sea-level plan seems to have made the early running. Wallace, interviewed by the board, was a firm proponent. Taft, too, had pronounced himself in favor of a sea-level canal while on the Isthmus at the end of 1904. Stevens, also, he said, had taken on the job expecting it to mean digging all the way down. On October 4, the board of engineers arrived in Panama. It was unusually pleasant weather for the week they spent there, dry with blue skies.

Three months later, the results of the board's deliberations, an enormous report, was handed in to the Isthmian Canal Commission. The
Engineering Record
called it “the most important document in the engineering history of the Panama Canal to date.” The experts had failed to agree unanimously, but had voted 8–5 in favor of the sea-level plan. In the majority group were all the Europeans, along with ex-governor Davis and two other Americans.

To comply with the instruction of the Spooner Act that the canal had to accommodate the largest ships then afloat or being planned would need locks of such size, they argued, as to be “beyond the limits of prudent design [and] safe and efficient administration.” Even so, however big the locks, they were bound to become obsolete at some time in the future. A sea-level canal, on the other hand, would be “easily expandable” in the future, and thus would “endure for all time.”

The plan put forward is close to that of the Old French Company of the early 1880s, with a tidal lock at Ancón and a large dam at Gamboa to regulate the flow of the Chagres, along with some nineteen miles of permanent diversion channels to restrict rivers that would otherwise flow into the canal prism. Even with the numerous levees and embankments envisaged, it was accepted that most of the volume of the Chagres would still have to use the canal to get to the sea: “The de Lesseps idea of a still water canal is thus replaced by a regulated river.” To build this canal, it was estimated, would cost $250 million and take twelve to thirteen years.

Virtually every element of this plan was sharply criticized by the proponents of the minority report, submitted to the ICC at the same time. Because of the immense depth of excavation needed at the Continental Divide, even with the steep sides the sea-level plan envisaged, the waterway at the bottom of the great gorge would be only 150 feet wide at its surface. Ships would be unable to pass each other, but would have to moor, as at Suez.

Some eighteen streams or rivers, it was calculated, would pour their waters into this deep and narrow chasm, creating currents of some 2.6 miles an hour as well as eroding banks and depositing silt. Even without the crosscurrents, the “narrow gorge” would be “tortuous.” For nineteen miles, a large ship would have to be continuously changing direction in channel with a width only from one quarter to one-fifth her own length. “Such a waterway,” wrote one of the minority report authors, “is far from meeting the conception of free and unobstructed passage popularly associated with a sea-level canal.” The danger of landslides—with hindsight the unconquerable obstacle to a sea-level plan—was alluded to, but not stressed. The nightmare of slides in the Cut was still largely to come for the Americans.

The minority report, largely the work of Joseph Ripley and distinguished U.S. engineer Alfred Noble (who had helped build the Weitzel Lock on the Soo Canals), was in favor of a lock canal. To satisfy the requirements of the Spooner Act, the locks would be 900 feet long and 95 feet wide, big enough to handle “the largest ships now existing or under construction”—the
Mauritania
and the ill-fated
Lusitania
, of the Cunard Line, both over 760 feet long with a beam of 88 feet. In comparison, Eiffel's locks had been under 600 feet long and about 60 feet wide. These new locks might be bigger than anything so far attempted, but they were not, Ripley and Noble argued, “beyond the limits of prudent design.” The example of Ripley's Soo Canal, where a huge volume of traffic between Lake Huron and Lake Superior had been handled without mishap since the 1850s, gave them confidence that such locks could provide “safe and efficient administration.”

The main difference between this lock-canal plan and everything that went before it was not just the scale of the locks, but the location of the “controlling feature” of the scheme, the great dam for the Chagres. This the minority reported shifted from Bohío to Gatún. It had been accepted that neither offered ideal situations for a dam, with their bedrock in places far below sea level. But Gatún had several important advantages, in spite of the fact that the dam there would need to be immense—a mile and a half long and 100 feet high, an unprecedented size. Because Gatún was downstream of Bohío, and rivers tend to deposit large and coarse material upstream and finer and denser material near the river mouth, the alluvial deposits that sat above the bedrock at Gatún would, it was hoped, be less permeable. But more important was the site of the dam. A far bigger expanse of water would be created than by blocking the river at Bohío—a new lake of some 164 square miles was envisaged stretching all the way through the Cut, drowning several villages and settlements as well as much of the existing Panama Railroad. It would be, if completed, bigger than any man-made lake before. And this additional size was the key: not only would the lake provide simple navigation for a large part of the transcontinental route and, because of its size, nullify problems of silting and currents; it would also tame forever the volatile Chagres. Unlike the previously mooted Lake Bohío, Lake Gatún would be wide enough so that the greatest floods would only raise its level a few inches, easily coped with by a spillway, whereby the Chagres would resume its route to the sea at San Lorenzo. At the same time, the proposed lake would provide, even in the dry season, enough water for the huge locks for twenty-six transits a day, or some 30 to 40 million tons of traffic annually. When and if this limit was reached, further control could be imposed on the water supply by the construction of a second dam upriver above Gamboa.

The ICC spent just under a month considering these two different proposals, then, on February 5, they opted to give their backing to the minority lock-canal plan. Stevens's influence seems to have been important. Although initially in favor of a sea-level canal, by October 1905 and the consulting board's trip to Panama, he had declared himself undecided. The following month, having carried out a “personal study of the conditions,” he was urging the ICC not to back the “impractical futility” of a canal
à niveau.
According to Stevens, he also talked round President Roosevelt, during a trip to Washington in January 1906. So when the matter was handed over to Congress to decide, the pro-sea-level board majority report was accompanied by the ICC's decision for locks, as well as a letter from the president backing up this decision. Taft had also changed his mind since the year before. So there was a letter from him in the package as well, in which he upped the time and money estimate of the majority report considerably, as well as warning of “the difficulties and dangers of navigation” the sea-level plan threatened. “We may well concede that if we could have a sea-level canal with a prism from 300 to 400 feet wide,” he wrote, “with the curves that must now exist reduced, it would be preferable to the plan of the minority. But the time and the cost of constructing such a canal are in effect prohibitory.”

To the frustration of everyone, especially those on the Isthmus, the decision was tied up in committee for several months. Almost anyone ever connected with the canal was wheeled out to give their opinion. Then, on May 17 the committee chose, by the margin of just one vote, to reject the advice of the ICC, Roosevelt, and Taft, and recommed to the Senate that they adopt the sea-level plan.

Drastic action was called for. Stevens was summoned again from Panama, to endure once more the sea-crossing and the machinations of political Washington. He had seen the Chagres in flood that month, and was more convinced than ever that the river would wreck a sea-level canal within a year. He hammered away at the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce about the problem of the Chagres, and put together a compelling speech in favor of the lock canal to be made in the Senate. This was delivered on June 19, by Philander Knox, previously Roosevelt's attorney general and now a senator from Pittsburgh, where, happily for his constituents, the massive steel lock structures would most likely be built.

But it was a good speech, well delivered, and just enough to do the job. Two days later the Senate voted 36 to 31 to back Stevens's judgment and on June 27, the House followed suit. Thus only a handful of votes determined the United States’ choice between a lock canal and a sea-level attempt that, in all likelihood, would have ended in failure.

So at last the decision was made, and the aimed-for canal had a definite shape for the first time. Starting at Limón Bay, a ship would take a short sea-level passage to Gatún, where it would find three tiers of double locks. These would raise the ship to the level of the new lake—85 feet above sea level. The vessel would cross the lake, which continued, like the spout of a funnel, through the Culebra Cut to Pedro Miguel. There, a much smaller dam would be encountered, containing a single tier of locks that would lower the boat to a small, intermediate lake at 55 feet above sea level. This would continue through to the gap between Ancón and Sosa Hills, where another small dam would hold two locks to lower the ship back to sea level and out into the Pacific. As the locks were to be in tandem, simultaneous two-way traffic would be possible. With some modification, this was the plan followed to the very end. Thus in place of de Lesseps's dream of an “Ocean Bosporus,” the Panama Canal would be instead a “bridge of water” between the two oceans. Instead of requiring the moving of the mountain, the waterway would go over it. And with the drowning of much of the French diggings in the Chagres valley under the new lake, millions of cubic yards of excavation, for which so many engineers and workers had suffered and died, were at a cruel stroke rendered irrelevant.

As soon as the decision was announced, the critics swung into action. The majority report of the board of consulting engineers had judged that a dam at Gatún would be a “vast and doubtful experiment.” “It is nothing short of monstrous to jauntily rest this national enterprise upon untried methods vastly beyond the range of experience and past success,” they had argued. Subsequent criticism remained focused on the dam, a “simply preposterous piece of work,” wrote one expert. In 1889 a large dam at Johnstown in Pennsylvania, similar in design to that mooted at Gatún, had collapsed; an entire city had been washed away and over two thousand lives lost. There were no proper foundations at the chosen site, argued a contributor to the
North American Review:
“To base any scheme on a work like the Gatún Dam, is to build a house on sand.”

Next in the firing line were the plans for the massive locks, the safety of which one engineer, Lindon Bates, called “the greatest engineering conflict of the canal.” The terrible danger was that a ship would ram the Gatún lock gates and thus cause the entire lake to pour out through the breach. “Every vessel in the waiting basin and every building and structure between Gatún and the sea in its path would be swept to utter annihilation,” wrote Bates in late June 1906. “The damage to the canal and locks could not be repaired for years. To refill Lake Gatún would consume nearly a year of itself. The adoption of the lock flight arrangement, which puts so fearful a premium upon an accident, cannot be characterized as other than a most colossal and disastrous mistake.”

Just before the time of Bates's writing, there had been a bad accident on the Manchester Ship Canal when a ship had failed to slow down and broken through a lock. As the
Manchester Guardian
reported on June 22: “In the Irlam lock the water is sixteen feet below the normal level; the muddy bottom is in many places exposed; and an abominable stench fills the air.” Bates concluded that “accidents are therefore at the Isthmus certain and inevitable,” particularly under tropical conditions where, he wrote, “the vitality of men is reduced, alertness and initiative are at their lowest.”

In fact, on the Isthmus, Stevens and his engineers had shown considerable initiative. Gambling on the lock-canal version being adopted, they had laid plans to start right away. Twenty-four hours after the decision, work began on clearing the site at Gatún and laying rails to bring spoil from Culebra to start the process of building the biggest dam ever seen.

f the metaphorical clouds cleared when the final plan for the canal was at last decided, on the Isthmus the wet season in mid-1906 was all too real. “Heavy rain day and night,” remembered one West Indian. Every worker recalls his clothes permanently soaked. “Hard rains had set in by this time,” wrote Rose van Hardeveld. “Everything smelled of mold and decay. Water fell from the sky in great drenching sheets. The house and everything in it was sticky and wet.” Her husband, working with his friend Jantje in the Cut, seldom had a dry shirt or a pair of dry shoes. Every night, exhausted, he would come home with mud and water squishing in his shoes and his shirt and trousers wringing wet. Rose's iron cookstove and kerosene lamps were little help in getting the clothes dry.