The Great Ditch.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLIX, Issue 6, 5 February 1913, Page 60

The Great Ditch.

MIGHTY LANDSLIDES AT PANAMA. (John Foster Fraser, in the "Daily Mail.”) fGreat earth slides have started in the Culebra cut of the Panama Canal, causing extensive damage. It will take some months to remove the debris.—Press Association cable, Washington. January 17.] The popular, spectacular thing is tho Culebra 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 the 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 remove a clear depth of 375 ft. of hill, to baql away about 100 million cubic yards of rock and earth—nearly half the total excavations in tho Canal construction—to have the work constantly checked by thousands of tows of the hillsides sliding into the Canal, bringing streams which had been diverted into the Cut, and threatening to flood the workers out; there is something

dramatic, majestic and occasionally terrible in it all.

This channel—not straight, but 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 thei first lock descending to the Pacific is placed—will be at the same elevation as Gatum Lake, 85ft. above the sea level. It will get water from the same source, mainly the Chagree 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” wagons trailing—waiting to be loaded with debris and to climb with their load.? up the slanting terraced ways, and carry the stuff long distances, and dump it where the 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. 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 shovels jerk forward, and start loading adjoining ears. 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 Cucasaeha, 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 of 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” aro still in motion, and will have to be 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 Hood part of it. It was a mighty labour getting the river diverted again and the water pumped out of the Cut before a start could be made to remove this unwelcome incursion of the Canal bank.

.Spend a morning in the Cut in the hot, humid, sickening air of the rainy season in the tropics. Downpours drench you, but 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, with 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 rock. With jaunty strides coloured

men come along balancing boxaa on theilj heads—dynamite. A email charge of dynamite ie pushed to the bottom of the drill-hole and fired by a magnettj battery to make the hole 'larger. Theqt from 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 month in the Cut alone 500,0001 b. of dynamite is used.

The steam ehovels, 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 etuff on a “dirt” train. Thet monster appears to quiver with restrained energy 7 . Some of these shovels can lift fivd cubic yards, and that means over eight tone of rock, or over six tons of earth. A 70-ton ehovel has shifted; 4,823 cubic yards in a day. The shifting in a full working hour is 289 cubit! yards. Striking the average for a day; each of these forty shovels shifts over 10,000 tone. Much more could bo shifted; the difficulty is getting the stuff, away. Even the thousands of dump; ears 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 th<J ferociousness with which the excavating goes on. In the veins of the workers i? a throbbing just over big results. Gcj day by day and you see little change. Let a month elapse, and then you mark: the difference. - And there is the Cut, a long, back passage through the hills, which tells of work done. Why, thq record clearance in one day is 127,742 tons, removed on 333 trains.