CULEBRA CUT.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXVII, Issue 19, 23 September 1913, Page 4

CULEBRA CUT.

The builders of the Panama Canal do not seem to have any better fortune of late, and once again the opening is put back by the slide in the Culebra Cut, as notified by cable a few days ago. Trouble in this direction was by no means unlooked for and there are even some pessimistic people who say that the difficulty is not to be got over. One authority states that at the end of last year there were still between 3,000,000 and 4,000,000 cubic yards of bank in motion, and the rotten volcanic formation of the country rendered it impossible to say whether this was the whole difficulty to be dealt with. The great Cucaracha slide started in the days when the French were at work, and it is still doming 1 away, the known extent of the bad ground being forty-seven acres. The village of Cnlebra itself is on top of a moving bank. The new slide has occurred on the bank that has hitherto been considered fairly safe, but with such a mixture of rocks and earth, and of rocks that cut hard and disintegrate on exposure to the air, there can be no certain calculation. The method of working has been to cut away the dangerous ground in terraces, and this has added enormously to the work of excavation. Nevertheless the work will be pushed on, and the greatest engineers are confident that they will win through all right and that when once the water is let into the Cut there will be no really serious obstruction through landslide.