Panama fever (75 page)

n the Isthmus, however, the “Army of Panama,” now numbering nearly fifty thousand, kept up 1908's high excavation total during the following year, as fatalities, particularly from disease, continued to fall. The largest cause of death, for the first time, was in 1909 from accidents on the works. On the Atlantic Division huge amounts of silt and sand were being sucked from the channel from coast to deep water, the old French canal from the bay to the site of the Gatún Dam and locks had been effectively redredged to carry materials to the construction side, and old French-era dredges, many twenty-five years old, were making progress in the channel from the bay to the locks.

On the Pacific Division there had also been steady progress, working in from the sea, shifting material with dredge, shovel, or hydraulic jet. In the harbor, an 11,000-foot-long breakwater was under construction to guard against submarines, and to prevent the channel from silting up. It was proving slow work as the dumped rock either disappeared into the mud of the bay or pushed up other sandbanks nearby. Eventually over ten times the originally estimated quantity of spoil would be required. But in the Central Division, the infamous Culebra Cut,
la grande tranchée
, had shown itself once more to be the biggest challenge of all.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“HELL'S GORGE”

In CíLebra, the mountains were on the move. Work on deepening the Cut had begun in earnest with the end of the steam-shovel men's strike in July 1907. But as the gorge grew in size, it was as if the land was fighting back. On the night of October 2, after particularly heavy rain, a great mass of earth and rock plunged down into the Cut from the slope just south of Gold Hill at Cucaracha. Two steam shovels were overturned and nearly buried, track and piping carrying water and compressed air were destroyed, and the drainage system was wrecked. Horrified engineers then noticed that the slide was continuing. An area of about fifty acres continued to move for the next ten days, sliding into the canal prism at a speed of about fourteen feet a day. Gaillard, the engineer in charge of the Cut, described it as being “a tropical glacier—of mud instead of ice.” Goethals reported that “it required night and day work to save our equipment.” By the time the equilibrium of that particular part of the mountain had been restored and the movement stopped, over half a million cubic yards had entered the Cut. In his end-of-year report for the Foreign Office, Mallet wrote, “the magnitude of the task is much greater than was at first thought.” “There is less disposition,” he went on, “to under-rate the French failure.” Certainly Goethals quickly revised his earlier view—the job in the Cut was now deemed the “most formidable of the canal enterprise.”

The first great Cucaracha slide was just the beginning. As the ditch was lowered foot by foot, there followed numerous similar “gravity slides.” In many places along the walls of the Cut, a layer of semi-porous clay sat on top of a stratum of impervious rock. Rainwater seeped through the clay to form a soapy, greasy layer on top of the harder rock. When this rock sloped toward the Cut, there would come a point when the friction between the two layers became so reduced that the top layer slipped into the Cut, “like snow off a roof.” The following year, 1908, saw slides of this type at Paraíso, near Gold Hill, and at Culebra.

But such was the baffling geology of the Cut, with rocks of all different types in bewildering combinations, that gravity slides, most usual during the wet season, were not the only problem. Some of the strata, previously long-buried, reacted to the air in a way that caused them to become unstable and unable to support material lying above. Other harder rock, depending on its lines of fracture, would collapse into the Cut when its lateral support was removed, bringing down upper layers as well.

Spaniard Antonio Sanchez, who worked in the Cut for four and a half years, told of a curse going back to French times. The ground itself, he said, would take revenge against those who sought to “dissect nature's creation.” Most vivid in his memory was the shrill sound of whistles from an accident site. If they were not at work, foremen would appear at their camp to demand that they come to help dig out men and equipment buried by slides. But while they were attempting to rescue the buried men, they too were subject to the danger of further slides. Sometimes the deep mud they worked in would prevent them from getting out of the way quickly enough if there was another earth movement. The majority of the time, he reports, they would only manage to dig out disfigured and broken bodies.

Most of the slides, however, were slower, although more substantial than these sorts of avalanches. But even if a slope moved toward the Cut at only a few inches a day, it still required the re-laying of miles and miles of track. And as soon as a slide was cleared, an engineer remembers, “the old hill politely slid back again, completely filling the canal.” As a West Indian worker put it, “Today you dig and tomorrow it slides.”

The slides made Culebra an unpredictable enemy for the “Army of Panama.” The deep gorge, wrote a senior U.S. administrator, “was a land of the fantastic and the unexpected. No one could say when the sun went down at night what the condition of the Cut would be when the sun arose the next morning. The work of months or even years might be blotted out by an avalanche of earth.” At the end of 1907 Goethals had to refuse to set a completion date for the canal as, he said, “The difficulties we are liable to encounter are unknown to ourselves and uncertain.” Another senior engineer confessed that it was impossible to plan for the final shape of the ditch as “this material has or will ultimately make its own design as to slopes.” In other ways as well, the Cut was “fantastic and unexpected.” Such was the geological chaos of the ground that dynamiters and steam shovel operatives, as Goethals explained, “found themselves handling hard rock one hour, while the next hour they might be working in earth or clay.” In some places the downward pressure of the unsupported rock faces would push up the comparatively soft strata of the canal floor, sometimes as much as thirty feet. On one occasion, Gaillard himself was standing at the bottom of the Cut when the ground he was standing on rose six feet in five minutes. Just as uncanny for the diggers were the cracks that appeared at the bottom of the Cut, spewing out stinking sulphurous fumes or boiling water. Blasts hot enough to char wood were emitted from the ground, caused by the oxidation of iron pyrites in the soil or by the vaporization of water in the intense heat of friction as the despoiled ground writhed and slipped.

To prevent the slides Goethals tried all the techniques then available. Shovels worked at the top of the slopes to reduce the weight of material pushing down on the lower levels. Long “nails” were driven into the sides of the trench to bind the porous layer to the rock beneath; slopes were plastered in concrete. Such measures were being used with success at the time by the British in Hong Kong, but the scale and complexity of the Cut would doom all to failure. To keep water from the slopes, large diversion channels were built near the crests to carry away moisture that might otherwise saturate the sides of the Cut. But this approach failed as well. The only option left was simply to dig it all out again.

Unlike the French, Goethals had the muscle to do it. The massive steam shovels, by now personalized with female names, were removing huge amounts of dirt. On average over the construction period they dug out a million cubic yards each, a testament to their sound construction and efficient maintenance. In the peak month of March 1909, there were sixty-eight shovels at work in the Cut excavating an astonishing 2 million cubic yards. In the same month seven hundred thousand pounds of powder was exploded. Thanks to the system set up by Stevens, 160 trains, carefully controlled from the construction headquarters at Culebra, ran in and out of the gorge every day, pulling thousands of flatcars to and from the dumps; in the Cut's nine miles there were now seventy-six miles of construction track.

The work never stopped. At the end of the day, the track shifters, dynamite gangs, and steam-shovel operators were replaced by coaling trains and maintenance crews who worked through the night so that nothing should delay progress the next day. And although about a quarter of the effort involved digging out material from slides, the Cut still got deeper and deeper and more and more spectacular.

he Cut was the “special wonder of the canal,” “one of the great spectacles of the ages.” Over 70 percent of the vast total canal excavation came from its nine miles. For the increasing number of tourists, gazing down into the great man-made canyon from its edge high above, it was an inspiring sight. “The Cut is a tremendous demonstration of human and mechanical energy,” wrote a British visitor. “It is simply the transformation of a mountain into a valley.” It was more than “heroic human endeavour,” said another. It was a “geological event.” The scale was overwhelming. “From the crest,” wrote an American tourist, “you looked down upon a mighty rift in the earth's crust, at the base of which pygmy engines and antlike forms were rushing to and fro without seeming plan or reason. Through the murky atmosphere strange sounds rose up and smote the ear of the onlooker with resounding clamor.” These included the “strident clink, clink, clink of the drills … the shrill whistles of the locomotives … the constant and uninterrupted rumble” of the ever-moving dirt trains, the “clanking of chains” of the shovels, “the cries of men, and the booming of blasts. Collectively the sounds were harsh, deafening, brutal such as we might fancy would arise from hell.”