THE GREAT DITCH.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXV, Issue 12, 13 January 1913, Page 3

THE GREAT DITCH.

MIGHTY LANDSLIDES AT PANAMA. (By John Foster Fraser, in the ‘Daily Mail.“

The popular, spectacular thing is the Cnlebra Cut. From the strictly engineering point of view.more worthy achievements are being won in the making of “The Great Ditch.” The Culebra Cut, however, is within range of the comprehension of the ordinary person. To delve through hills for nine miles, cut a channel with an average depth of. 120 ft., with a minimum width of 300 ft,. to slice through the Continental “divide,” Gold Hill and Contractor’s Hill, separating the watersheds towards the Pacific and the Atlantic, to reipove a clear depth of 37oft. of hill, to, haul away about 100 million cubic yards of rock and earth—nearly half the total excavations in the Canal construction —to have the work constantly -checked by thousands of tons of the hillsides sliding into the Canal, bringing streams which had been diverted into tho Cut, and threatening to flood the workers out; there is something dramatic, majestic and occasionally terrible in it all.

This channel—not straight, hut gently serpentining through the valley of the Rio Obispo to the “divide” and beyond this point through the valley of the Rio Grande to Pedro Miguel, where the first lock descending to the Pacific is placed—will be at the same elevation as Gatum Lake, Soft, above the sea level. It will get water from the same source, mainly the Chagre§ River. I stood on the lip of Contractor’s Hill and looked down and along the great black trough. A dull roar constantly sounded. To-day there are seventy-five miles of shaky railway track in the Cut with engines screeching impatiently—their long “dirt” waggons trailing—waiting to be loaded with debris and to climb with their loads up the slanting terraced ways and carry the stuff long distances and dump it where banks are being made, or down to the swampy shores near Balboa. There, one of these days, will be wharfs and piers and sheds to hold merchandise, also a great railway yard. Ever Shifting Railway. The monster locomotives look like toys from the elevation. On the Cut sides are clusters of men, busy'like ants, white men and coloured men, working in separate gangs. There is the constant screech of the drills. There are thunderous blasting explosions, reverberating like'cannon. Behind brown clouds, billowing half across the Cut, hundreds of tons are dislodged. The steam shovehTjerk forward and start loading adjoining cars. To keep pace with the excavations a mile of track has to be shifted each day. Over twenty “slides” have interfered with the work. The Culebra Cut would have been finished now if it had not been for these disasters. The largest “slide” is the Cucasacha, which began during one of the two French attempts to make a canal, covers forty-seven acres, and has broken back nearly two thousand feet from the Cut. Nearly 17,000,000 cubic yards cf extra. material have had to be removed from the Cut because of “slides.” It is. recognised that between three and four million cubic yards of “slides” are still in motion and will have to bo dealt with besides the ordinary excavation. Only in August last there was a tremendous break near Empire, and it stretched half across the Cut, burying an enormous quantity of machinery, and, what was worse, causing consternation to the engineers by allowing the diverted River Obispo to rush into the Cut and flood part of it. It was a mighty labour getting the river diverted again and the water pumped out of the Cut before a could be made to remove this unwelcome incursion of the Canal bank.

The Magnitude of It. Spend a morning in the Cut in the hot, humid, sickening air of the rainy season in the Tropics. Downpours drench you, hut that is preferable to the thick, steamy, enervating atmosphere when the sun blazes. Here is a gang of men, clambered upon the rubble of a broken bank, witn drills working into the rock like giant needles on a sewing machine. The drills are all operated by compressed air, of which a long main pipe runs the length of the Cut. The drills drive 24ft. into the rocs. With jaunty strides coloured men come along balancing boxes on their heads —Dynamite. A small charge of dynamite is pushed to the bottorii of the drill-hole and fired by a magneto battery to make the hole larger. Then »rom 751 b to 2001 b weight of dynamite is plugged into the hole, and the explosion is brought about by ordinary electric light current. It is like a thunderclap—and a torrent of rock - and earth is flung forth. Every 1 month in the Cut alone 500,0001 b of J dynamite is used.

The steam shovels, cumbrous, ugly, but with great strength, fascinate one. There are forty of them at work in the Cut. By lever the huge scuttle is pressed among the blasted debris, lifts it and throws the,r.stuff on a “dirt” train. The mops ter; appears to quiver with restrained, energy. Some of these shovels can lift five cubic yards, and that means over eight tons of rock, or over six tons of earth. A 70-ton shovel has shifted 4823 cubic yards in a-day. The shifting in a full working hour is 289 cubic yards. Striking the. average for a day, each of these forty shovels shifts over- 10,000 tons. Much more could be shifted ;the difficulty is getting the stuff away. Even the thousands of dump cars and the seventy-five miles of railway track are hedged by limitations. As it is, 175 trains haul out of the Cut every day, or a train every two and a half minutes. Statistics like these indicate the ferociousness with which the excavating goes on. In the veins of the workers is a,throbbing just over big results. Co day by day and you see little change. Let ar month elapse, and theft you mark the difference. And there is the Cut, a long, back passage thrortgh the hills, which tells of work done. Why, the record' clearance in one day is 127,742. tons, removed on 333 trains. ' w-<

The average load/ of a' train of twenty dump'Oars is 610' tons, lire stuff is hauled miles away] 'and operated by compressed air power, a steel shield slides hldng the calV, 1 and frees the whole Md lJ in tweritp nlinutes.

At the sohlhhrn end of J the Cut you come t 6; the* Passive ’ Pedro Miguel lock—locally known as the Peter Magill. All the hot, scurrying, and clanging and convulsive movements'of big machinery which distinguished the Gatun locks is repeated. This is the lock by whip!} vessels an eying Pacificwards will b .Jjqwe r cd, 3Q, T 1 -3rd feet to the Miraflores,,lake —artificial, a mile and a half long,-partly,created by water being allowed through from the Cut and partly by the capture of small rivers. Then two locks; 1 which will lower the vessel to sea level, and the ocean is met eight miles off at Balboa. As on the Atlantic Side, here are tremendous breakwaters. Several little islands are being joined, so that the entrance to the Canal is practically a land-locked harbour. The Americans are building fortications. The Brains of the Scheme. From sea to sea: small gangs and great gangs of workers are encountered. At the locks there are fifty gangs doing fifty different jobs. Each gang is doing its bit independently of anybody else. Behind the apparentconfusion you know there must be a system, and that every piece of work has to be fitted into its place. Somewhere are brains directing the complicated scheme.

You will find them in the chief engineer’s office at Culehra. Every night there come in detailed reports of what has been done. Every morning Colonel Goethals and his staff review and arrange as though a siege was in progress. Every detail is attended to. There is a “field hospital;”, special trains carry all that is necessary to do repairs on the spot. .Every night, under the glare of .electric lights, gangs of repairers are "out attending to the machines reported to be defective. At Gorgona is a repair shop where 1200 men are employed. In and out, dodging about, you often see automobiles hastening over the jolting railway tracks. The workers call them “brain cars.” For by them travel the men who think and decide. They are United States army engineers. They are khaki-clad men, tall, lithe, bronzed, clear-eyed; but there is a lot of grey in their hair. They nervously eat the ends of cigars and chat with you gaily as though cutting a continent in two was not a matter of much moment.