THE PANAMA CANAL.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIII, Issue 16331, 11 September 1916, Page 9

THE PANAMA CANAL.

SLIDES DIFFICULTY. SHIP'S OFFICER'S VIEWS. , Interesting opinions, bearing on the recent great slide in the Panama Canal wore expressed yesterday by a ships officer. Tho vessel to which lie belonged had passed through the canal a short time before the most recent slip occurred. Referring to tho comparatively narrow cutting -where tho slides occur, he said the proper name for it was the Gaillard Cut, and not, as it was commonly called, the Culebra Cut. It was near tho village of Culebra, on one of the banks of the Gaillard cutting, that the greatest difficulty occurred. At that part, the canal passed between two hills, each about 200 ft higher than the water level of the canal itself. They were composed of hard material, difficult to excavate, but tho earth had the peculiar property that after a, new fall had been exposed to tho atmosphere for about a week, it became crumbling, and slides resulted. Always there was difficulty with small slides. The canal was a great engineering work, and the passage through it impressed every voyager who experienced it, yet despite the magnitude of the work it was felt that there was a great task still unfinished in regard to tho removal of the hill opposite Culebra. It did not, however, present itself as an insuperable difficulty. Tho danger zone was about a mile long. A new idea that had been adopted to obviate slides into the canal had been to take away earth from the side of the hill opposite the canal. By that means it had been hoped to cause the slides to foil the other way, in the same way that a, treo would fall according to the cutting. One of the most staggering features, said tho officer, was the Gatun Lake of 168 acres. Once it was a valley, but to-dav it %ns a great body of water, dotted with islands which used to be the peaks which rose above the valley.