A Reluctant Confession

Credit where it’s due. Rarely has Nature marshalled so many forces to defend her territory. But after each retreat, engineers regrouped, and resumed their advance.

Panama City, Panama

April 27, 2024

Yesterday, we recalled how Panamanians assumed control of their canal. Today, after a visit to the Miraflores Locks, we look more closely at what they acquired.

Transoceanic trade includes four key conduits: the Straits of Malacca and Gibraltar, the canal at Suez…

…and the tropical trench we visited yesterday.

Before this week, we’d been thru Panama, but never to it. We sailed its canal seven years ago. It’s a marvel of ingenuity and the apex of engineering, justifiably ranked among the wonders of the world.

Locks at either end lift ships to Gatun Lake, an artificial reservoir created to reduce excavation required to construct the canal. When completed, it was the largest dam and man-made lake in the world. But it didn’t come easy.

Seeking a Way Across the Isthmus

Emperor Charles V was first to float the idea of a Central American water route. In 1534, he ordered a survey of potential shortcuts for Spanish ships sailing to Peru.

A century later, the Scottish attempted an overland path thru the Darién Gap. It failed miserably, leaving Scotland financially ruined, and prompting its acquiescence to the Act of Union.

The notion of a waterway revived in the nineteenth century, particularly after the Erie canal was completed in New York. The British gave it a shot, but their effort never got off the ground.

The California Gold Rush accelerated interest, prompting US construction of the Panama Railroad across the isthmus. Finished in 1855, its tracks cleared jungle that eased creation of the eventual canal. A quarter century later, the French determined to get it built.

A dozen years after his success at Suez, Ferdinand de Lesseps turned his attention to the Isthmus of Panama. The two places couldn’t be more different. Lesseps’s stubborn insistence on a sea-level canal confirmed the contrast.

His earlier channel…across flat, vast, desert terrain…attracted funding for the new one. But it couldn’t overcome torrential rains, dense flora, venomous fauna, treacherous topography, and tropical disease in a rugged jungle.

Within a decade, the money dissipated and many men were dead. The effort was abandoned, and those who led it were prosecuted or shamed.

A few years later, the Compagnie Nouvelle du Canal de Panama took over the project, recommending locks and lakes to convey ships thru the cut.

But its main job was to run the railroad and maintain the existing excavation and equipment so they could be sold. Phillipe Bunau-Varilla was made manager of the company, and offered all its assets for $100M.

He found a buyer in the United States. But not at his price. Competing proposals resurfaced for a canal further north, thru Lake Nicaragua.

With this bargaining chip, the Americans offered Bunau-Varilla $40M for the Panama property.

To cut his losses, he begrudgingly accepted.

Gunboat Diplomacy for Banker Benefactors

During these negotiations, Colombia demanded the U.S. pay it $10M to build the canal. Having already forked over $40M to purchase that right, Roosevelt resorted to “gunboat diplomacy”…fomenting a phony “revolution” to sever Panama from Colombia.

The president had self-interested reasons for denying Colombia a cut. The $10M would’ve come out of the $40M given to the real owners of the “French” company…a Wall Street syndicate headed by Roosevelt’s benefactor, J.P. Morgan.

With the Nicaragua threat, and because the Compagnie Nouvelle du Canal de Panama was basically bankrupt, the banker consortium (of which  Roosevelt’s brother-in-law was also a member) secretly bought the company on the cheap. The Panamanian “rebellion” was a ruse instigated to preserve their profit.

After the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty of 1903, the U.S. took control. A Canal Zone was established across the isthmus, including the “Culebra Cut” that cleaves the eponymous range at the Continental Divide.

Marriage by Divorce

The nine-mile cut is among engineering’s monumental accomplishments. The French started it, but yellow fever and financial difficulties left it incomplete. When the Americans took over, they widened the cut, with locks alleviating need for a deeper dig. At some pint, it was more feasible to lift the water than lower the land.

As Ira Bennett put it in his History of the Panama Canal, engineers could marry the oceans only by divorcing the mountains.

It took six thousand men to put them asunder. Hundreds of compressed air drills bored holes for half a million pounds of dynamite per month. Explosions fractured rock so steam shovels could pull it away.

To accommodate literally mountains of material, engineers converted a nearby Pacific island into a new peninsula. This new land bridge doubles as a breakwater keeping silt from Panama Bay from entering the Panama Canal.

Almost two hundred daily trains hauled excavations from the cut, requiring careful coordination and skilled logistics to manage trains entering and exiting almost every minute.

A Reluctant Confession

At this point…despite my pedigree…I’m compelled to whisper a reluctant confession: the canal owes (almost) as much to Industrial as to Civil Engineering. And I’m not just saying that because I’m a Georgia Tech civil engineer invited to be here by a group of Georgia Tech industrial engineers…one of whom happens to be my wife.

I admit it because it’s true. Till the Americans took over construction of the canal, there was little semblance of operational rigor or logistics management...or even of preparing for the worst and hoping for the best. There seems to have been little preparation at all.

Inadequate planning, organization, systems, and processes were among the primary reasons the French failed. Lesseps assumed Panama would resemble Suez. Discarding these misconceptions and deficiencies would be indispensable to completing the canal.

Civil engineers design and manage the geotechnical, seismic, material, structural, and hydraulic components of canal construction. Industrial engineers coordinate the logistics, systems, and supply chains that make the project possible.

Yet even the best-laid plans couldn’t prevent unforeseen obstacles. Among the most challenging were landslides.

Tropical Glaciers and a Raging River

The first and largest was described as a “tropical glacier”, of mud rather than ice, composed of clay too soft for steam shovels to remove. Till the sludge was eventually sluiced away, these avalanches of ooze led many to believe a canal couldn’t be built.

But as work resumed, doubt remained. To minimize risk, rock heights were reduced and additional sediment was removed from upper levels.

But landslides persisted throughout construction. Some continued after the canal was completed, resulting in intermittent closures.

Rarely has Nature marshalled so many forces to defend her territory. But after each retreat, engineers regrouped, and resumed their advance.

Unanticipated impediments should be expected. And perhaps we should feel fortunate some predictions aren’t perfect.

Before work began, had anyone known what the task would entail…that the Culebra Cut would cost $10M per mile and excavate 100M cubic yards of material, that lock-level cuts removed as much material as was estimated for sea-level cuts, that more material was taken from the Culebra Cut than was initially predicted for the entire channel from ocean to ocean…there might not be a Panama Canal today.

If the Culebra represented one challenge, the Chagres offered another.

This is among the rare rivers that (now) empties into two oceans. Its natural course is toward the Atlantic. But canal construction also pulled its waters thru the locks and cut, and into to the Pacific.

The Chagres was a wild stream, unruly and tumultuous. Taming it was essential to creating the canal, and preserving the primary water supply of the Panamanian people.

When the Americans took over, engineer John Stevens decided to control the river by capturing it.

Rather than cut a new canal along the entire length of the existing torrent, Stevens dammed the Chagres to create a lake. Lake Gatun would ease construction between the Atlantic locks and the Culebra cut.

Two decades later, second dam created a reservoir to replenish the canal. Over the last year, it hasn’t been enough. A La Niña-induced drought dropped water-levels to historic lows.

Because of decreased draft, daily transits are drastically reduced. This summer, they’ll slowly be added back. But the Canal Authority is being careful.

A New Challenge

Among the world’s transoceanic trade channels, the Panama Canal is the only one that’s (mostly) fresh water. That water supplies the needs of Panamanian citizens, which take priority over commercial passages.

And as water level has sunk and larger locks have been added, increased salinity…particularly from the Pacific…has infiltrated the interior. Salt water fish are appearing in greater abundance. Even small sharks have been seen in the canal watershed.

Should salt intrusion become too great, water from Gatun Lake could become unsuitable for drinking. Keeping it consumable is the new challenge for canal engineers.

Having had the pleasure of meeting a few of them yesterday, and of speaking with some of our hosts from the Logistics Innovation and Research Center of Georgia Tech Panamá, we think they’re up to the task.

JD