Caterpillar Boot Not Slow

Ten years may sound a long time but that was how long it took to build the Panama Canal, but what a feat it was. There cannot be many engineering projects that have been more difficult or fraught with danger than the construction of the Panama Canal.

Debate had raged towards the end of the nineteenth century as to whether it would be practical to link the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The advantages were obvious for all to see with these two great oceans being linked. Cape Horn had always been a hazardous area so time was not the only advantage governments and shippers could see.

The French made a first attempt at a canal but many thousands died, malaria being particularly common in Central America at that time. That same disease claimed more lives when the Canal actually came to be built by the Americans but more efforts were put into the control of malaria and yellow fever in their venture.

They began in 1904 and finished ten years later with still over 5000 deaths during the ten years. Buying the French equipment, they assembled and equipped a huge task force, overall and caterpillar boot was the order of the day.

It was hazardous terrain and that caterpillar boot was an invaluable item within the workers kit. Working conditions were difficult at best but the people in charge recognised they needed to provide adequate and sanitary accommodation if disease was not to take over. In such a case, there would be no controlling its spread.

There was massive excavation to undertake and the transportation of earth, equipment and materials and men provided a logistical problem that only a railway could solve. The railway line was generally parallel to the canal construction thereby easing the problems of transport to and from the specific work areas at any one time.

At any one time there were over a hundred and fifty trains doing various tasks, a huge logistical exercise with millions of tones of earth being moved away while the construction materials needed to be moved in.

The original completion date was 1916 but it was competed two years before and opened in the August of 1914, just as the First World War was beginning in Europe. That was one of the reasons why the traffic through the canal was relatively small in the early years but it has grown to a huge figure in modern times, in excess of 14,000 ships per year and it will not be many years, at the present rate of progress that a million vessels will have gone through the canal.

The debate was not really about whether there was any benefit in the link, it was whether it was practical to undertake and complete the project. The figures above show just how important the positive outcome to the debate and the completion of the project has been.