Panama Canal
The Panama Canal is a waterway that cuts through a narrow strip of land in Central America called the Isthmus of Panama. Located in the nation of Panama, the canal connects the Pacific Ocean with the Caribbean Sea, a part of the Atlantic Ocean. Because of the way the isthmus bends, ships have to travel west to east to get from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
The length of the Panama Canal is about 40 miles (65 kilometers) from shoreline to shoreline. The distance between deep Atlantic water and deep Pacific water is about 51 miles (82 kilometers). From its Atlantic entrance at the city of Colón, the canal runs south to the middle of Gatún Lake. From there, the canal follows a generally southeastern course until it reaches the Bay of Panama at the city of Balboa on the Pacific side.
Unlike the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal is not a simple channel dug through earth and rock. Instead it relies on locks and lakes. A canal lock is an enclosure that separates two different levels of water. It has gates at both ends, only one of which is opened at a time. After a ship enters the lock, the gate shuts behind it. Then water pours in, raising the ship to the level of the water ahead. Then the front gate opens and the ship goes on. Going in the other direction, water drains from the lock to lower the ship.
A ship traveling through the canal passes through three stages of locks. The first locks encountered after entering from the Atlantic side are the Gatún Locks. At Gatún a series of three locks lift the ship 85 feet (26 meters) to Gatún Lake, an artificial lake created by a dam on the Chagres River. At this height the ship travels about 24 miles across the lake and 8 miles (13 kilometers) through the Gaillard (or Culebra) Cut, a winding stretch of the canal. Then the Pedro Miguel and Miraflores locks take the ship down again to sea level. The process is reversed for a ship passing from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
Each of the Panama Canal locks is the same length, width, and depth. Locks are built in side-by-side pairs so that one ship can go down while another goes up. To ensure safety, no ship is allowed to go through the locks under its own power. Instead the ship is pulled by little electric locomotives that move along tracks on the walls of the locks. The ship is connected to the locomotives by massive cables. A full-time canal pilot on the ship gives orders to the operators of the locomotives to help guide the ships through the locks safely.
Using the canal, ships can travel between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans without having to go completely around the South American continent. The voyage between the East and West coasts of the United States is about 9,200 miles (14,800 kilometers) shorter using the canal. Instead of taking many days to round Cape Horn, a ship can get through the canal in 15 to 20 hours, including waiting time.
An almost endless variety of goods passes through the canal day after day. About 190 million tons of oceangoing commercial cargo are shipped through the canal in a single year. The main commodities that are transported include petroleum (oil), petroleum products, and grains. Some supertankers and navy ships, however, are too large to get through the canal locks.
People dreamed of a Central American shortcut between the Atlantic and the Pacific from the time of the early Spanish explorers. The first real attempt to create one was made in 1881 or 1882 by Ferdinand de Lesseps, the man whose company built the Suez Canal. His plan was to cut a sea-level channel through the isthmus. The effort was poorly planned, however, and diseases associated with the tropical setting killed thousands of workers. Lesseps eventually gave up.
In the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty of 1903, the country of Panama granted canal-building rights to the United States. The agreement also gave the United States the sole right to control a strip of land surrounding the canal called the Canal Zone. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt is considered to be the driving force behind the building of the canal. However, most of the actual work was done during the administration of William Howard Taft (1909–13).
The major decision facing U.S. engineers was whether to build a sea-level or a high-level canal that would rely on locks. A proposal for a high-level canal, originally made in 1879 by a French engineer, became the basis for the final plan drawn in 1906 by John F. Stevens. Stevens was the chief engineer of the U.S. Isthmian Canal Commission.
Construction sped up after the U.S. Congress adopted Stevens' plan. By this time the U.S. medical staff knew how to control tropical diseases such as yellow fever and malaria. Medical officer William Crawford Gorgas and engineer George Washington Goethals became the heroic figures of an enormous undertaking. At times more than 40,000 people and 100 steam shovels were at work. The Panama Canal was opened to traffic on August 15, 1914.
The Canal Zone cut Panama in half. It was governed as if it were a colony of the United States. This led to much friction between the United States and Panama during the 20th century. The Panama Canal Treaty of 1977 marked the beginning of the end of U.S. control over the canal and the Canal Zone. On December 31, 1999, the United States officially completed the transfer of control to Panama.
