Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose

by Willis J. Abbot

Photo by Underwood & Underwood

SLICING OFF THE CHIEF ENGINEER’S OFFICE

The slides are by no means wholly in the wet season despite the popular impression to that effect, though it was in the height of that season that the one at Cucaracha began. Yet I have seen a slide moving slowly in January when the shovels digging fiercely at its base were enshrouded in clouds of dust. Curiously enough though tracks have been torn up, machinery engulfed and wrung into indistinguishable tangles of steel, no man was caught in any of these avalanches prior to May, 1913, when three were thus lost. The tax they have put upon time and labor however has been heavy enough. Within the 8⁴⁄₅ miles of the Culebra Cut fully 200 miles of track have been covered up, destroyed or necessarily rebuilt because of slides, and at one point tracks had to be maintained for nearly two years on ground moving from three or four inches to several feet a day. Of course this necessitated the constant work of repair gangs and track layers. When the Canal is completed nearly 22% of the excavation will have been of material put in the way by slides—a fact which seems to give some belated support to the prophecy of the early Spanish theologians that God would not permit the Isthmus to be pierced, but would array new and unexpected forces against so blasphemous an effort to interfere with His perfect work.

One feature of the slides which would surely have awed the pious prophets of the Spanish day, and which did indeed considerably perplex our more prosaic engineers, was the little wisps of smoke that arose from the slowly moving soil. That this was volcanic few believed, except some newspaper correspondents in eager search for sensations. The true explanation that heat generated by friction working upon the water in the earth caused the steam was all very well and complete as an explanation of that particular phenomenon. But it left a certain worried feeling in the minds of the men who spent their days in putting hundreds of plugs of dynamite into holes drilled in the rock which the scientists declared superheated. Dropping a dynamite cartridge into a red-hot rock is apt to create a menace to the continued life and health of the dropper which even the excellent sanitary brigade of Col. Gorgas could scarcely control successfully. For a time there was a halt in the blasting operations and indeed two blasts were fired prematurely by this natural heat, but fortunately without loss of life. Finally the scheme was devised of thrusting an iron pipe into the drill hole and leaving it there a few minutes. If it was cool to the touch on withdrawal all was well; if hot a stream of water was kept playing in the hole while the charge was inserted and tamped down.

Dynamite has been man’s most useful slave in this great work, but like all slaves it now and then rises in fierce and murderous revolt. “Though during the past three and one-quarter years, in work under the writer’s charge”, writes Col. Gaillard, “over 20,000,000 pounds of dynamite were used in blasting, but eight men have been killed, three of whom failed to go to a safe distance and were killed by flying stones, and two by miscounting the number of shots which had gone off in a ‘dobe’ group, and approaching the group before the last shot had exploded”.

Photo by Underwood & Underwood

HOW TOURISTS SEE THE CUT
The picture shows Vincent Astor’s party in the observation car

Something like 12,000,000 pounds of dynamite a year was imported from “the states” to keep the job going, over 6,000,000 pounds a year being used in Culebra Cut alone, and many an unsuspecting passenger danced over the tossing Atlantic waves with a cargo beneath him explosive enough to blow him to the moon. On the Zone the stuff is handled with all the care that long familiarity has shown to be necessary, but to the uninitiated it looks careless enough. It is however a fact that the accidents are continually lessening in number and in fatalities caused. The greatest accident of all occurred December 12, 1908, when we had been only four years on the job. It was at Bas Obispo, and in order to throw over the face of a hill of rock that rose from the west bank of the Canal at that point nearly 44,000 pounds of dynamite had been neatly tamped away in the holes drilled for that purpose. Actually the last hole of this prodigious battery was being tamped when it exploded and set off all the others. A colossal concussion shook all the face of the earth. The side of the hill vanished in a cloud of smoke and dust from which flying rocks and trees rose into the air. When the roar of the explosion died away cries of anguish rose on the trembling air. About the scene of the explosion an army of men had been working, and of these 26 had been killed outright and a host more wounded. No such disaster has ever occurred again though there have been several small ones, and many narrow escapes from large ones.