Panama Canal: The Brutal Conditions Endured To Build An Engineering Marvel | Super Structures

deep in the jungles of Central America and the man has battled nature to build an engineering marvel its epic story continues to astonish us its dimensions defy imagination its price thousands of lives it's the crossroads of the world's economy to protect it America has gone to war it's the superstructure called the Panama Canal [Music] [Music] [Music] December 20th 1989 under cover of darkness 20,000 American troops invade the tiny Central American nation of Panama gunfire shatters the stillness of the night the invaders pursue their prey general Manuel Noriega Panama's ruthless dictator and a suspected drug trafficker [Music] four days later Noriega surrenders the United States declares victory but America has not put 20,000 lives at risk simply to arrest one man noriega zai earn grip on Panama threatened one of the world's most important super structures the Panama Canal the canal was born of a fierce struggle between man and nature a battle that began at the dawn of the 20th century when America's greatest engineers took on the biggest challenge of their lives and astonished the world from 1904 to 1914 40,000 workers dug and blasted their way through some of the toughest terrain on planet Earth they dug the deepest ditch built the largest dam poured the biggest concrete structures the world had ever seen [Music] they gave their sweat and they gave their blood thousands gave their lives [Music] the Panama Canal links the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans at the Isthmus of Panama a mere 50 miles wide narrowest point between North and South America when a ship enters the canal from the Pacific Ocean two sets of locks raised at 85 feet above the sea at this elevation the ship sails nine miles through a man-made channel carved from the mountains of the Continental Divide then 23 more miles across the second largest man-made lake on earth as it nears the Atlantic another set of locks lowers it to sea level by sailing through the Panama Canal a ship saved nearly 30 days the time it takes to sail around the tip of South America yet five million years ago there was no need for a Panama Canal the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans freely flowed between North and South America then about two million years ago the ocean floor erupted 50 miles of volcanic rock arose between the seas the Isthmus of Panama was born eons later men dreamed of reopening the ancient path between the oceans digging 50 miles seems seductively easy but in Panama it wasn't the Isthmus of Panama was one of the most difficult sites to dig a canal in the world it was geologically unstable it had mountain sides that tended to slip it was seismically active and still is it has a huge almost impenetrable jungle covering it and enormous Lea jumbled varieties of stone and terrain at the end of the 19th century men learn just how formidable a foe the Isthmus of Panama could be in 1881 France undertook the world's first attempt to dig a Panama Canal confidence was high and with good reason in charge was one of the greatest entrepreneurs of his age Ferdinand de Lesseps it was de Lesseps who in 1869 had accomplished one of the most impressive engineering feats of all time excavating the Suez Canal across Egypt joining the Mediterranean with the Red Sea but the Suez was a ditch dug to sea-level in the flat deserts of Egypt sea level was a mere 50 feet below the ground in mountainous Panama it was ten times deeper they moved mountains to build the Panama Canal but they didn't have to remove the entire Mountain if the if you build a sea-level canal you would have literally had to have removed the entire Mountain French engineers began digging in 1881 some eight years later they had excavated only a few miles of earth [Music] giant French steam shovels littered Panama's swamps rusting and abandoned yet in the end it was not only massive mountains that defeated the French Europe's finest engineers had also been vanquished by an almost invisible enemy today we know that mosquitoes transmit malaria and yellow fever deadly diseases which even today afflict millions of people but in the 1880s no one suspected that these tiny insects could kill ironically the French worried more about ants in order to prevent ants from crawling up on the beds of the hospital patients they placed each leg of each iron bedstead in a cup of water and that's where the mosquitoes bred panama's eight month rainy season bred mosquitos by the thousands and by the thousands the French began to die people were dying so fast from yellow fever and malaria that when they brought you into the French Hospital the stories are that many times the pine box the coffin was brought in before you actually died in just eight years twenty-two thousand members of the French canal company died of disease the horrific death toll was matched by financial hemorrhaging Ferdinand de Lesseps poured 287 million dollars into his canal project and went bankrupt it was the greatest financial disaster of the 19th century in 1903 the exhausted French gave up and sold their Panama excavations to a young nation which had just proven its engineering prowess by taming a continent the United States had the hubris to believe that it could succeed where the French had failed many wondered if it could but the Americans understood something the French had not to dig its canal America would begin not with shovels but with test tubes a doctor not an engineer would lead the way u.s. army physician Colonel William C Gorgas arrived in Panama in 1904 Gorgas was a controversial figure many dismissed his unorthodox methods of controlling disease but these methods had worked brilliantly in Cuba after the spanish-american war in Panama Gorga's assembled his weapons 3,000 garbage cans 4,000 buckets 1000 brooms 5,000 pounds of soap and 120 tons of insecticide he sent battalions of workers into the streets and the swamps and the jungles of Panama with orders to hit the mosquitos wherever they lived draining puddles and other mosquito breeding grounds Gorga's army sprayed thousands of gallons of oil across ponds and swamps killing the insects larvae [Music] fumigating entire towns again and again the cleanup took a year and a half but by Christmas 1906 yellow fever and malaria had been virtually eliminated to this day the Canal Zone remains the most disease-free strip of tropical landscape on earth William C Gorgas would only be the first of many brilliant men to tackle the challenge of building of Panama Canal it would be a task that would test the limits of each man's considerable abilities for even without mosquitos Panama remained a formidable geological challenge to dig their canal American engineers mounted the biggest and most expensive peacetime endeavor in history again and again they confronted seemingly insurmountable difficulties inventing new and ingenious ways to overcome them [Music] in 1992 Panama Canal engineers began a massive ten-year excavation project [Music] they will dig and blast 40 million cubic yards of Earth widening the canal channel so today's gigantic cargo vessels can pass one another in its narrowest parts it's the latest chapter in an engineering saga which began at the dawn of the 20th century when the Americans began their canal in 1904 engineers laid out an ambitious master plan that would take ten years to complete that plan called for building three gigantic sets of locks one on the Atlantic and two on the Pacific to supply the canal with its water engineers would need to Dam the chakras the largest river in central Panama the lake created by the dam would make it unnecessary to dig a canal all the way across Panama because ships could sail some 23 miles across the lake but between the lake and the Pacific locks Panama's rugged backbone would have to be tackled with shovel and pick this was the Continental Divide an unbroken chain of mountains stretching from the Rockies in North America to the Andes in the South here the canal builders would face their first challenge digging a ditch nine miles long 300 feet wide and 350 feet deep it would not be easy [Music] the French had tried to pierce this formidable barrier and fail the problem was that you didn't have stable hillsides they looked like rock but they were so badly fissure dand layered in this direction that they kept on slipping every time you'd cut something it's like digging digging a foundation for a house in mud to battle the Continental Divide America sent an unlikely champion his name was John Stevens Stevens had never built a canal he was a railroad man famous for laying track and blasting tunnels where no one else could when he arrived in Panama in 1905 he was 52 years old and had built over a thousand miles of railroad in the United States as much as any man alive [Music] but could a railroad man dig the world's toughest canal John Stephens pondered the abandoned French excavations a shallow ditch called the Culebra cut his railroaders mind grasped a crucial fact which the French hadn't the key to conquering Culebra cut wasn't excavation it was transportation one of the biggest technological challenges in completing the Panama Canal was what today would would probably be called construction management and systems engineering how to move all of the millions of cubic feet of material that were being excavated because you can't just dig dirt out you've got to do something with it and in order to do something with that magnitude of dirt you have to have a rail system a transportation system that is very sophisticated and very adaptable under John Stephens the 50 mile wide Isthmus of Panama was soon laced with over 450 miles of track and trains moving dirt men and supplies with relentless efficiency as dirt laden flat cars raced away to dumping sites a steady supply of empties arrived ready for steam shovels to fill but one difficulty remain how to unload millions of cubic yards of Earth finding no existing solutions the Americans simply invented one a 3 ton steel plow pulled by a powerful winch along the length of a dirt train in 10 minutes this ingenious device unloaded more earth than men with shovels could remove in hours the railroad solved many problems but it created another how to move miles of railroad track to keep up with the advancing steam shovels John Stevens invented a new device called the track shifter this simple but effective machine allow the railroad to follow the digging wherever it went what he did was design a crane that moved along the track itself leaning forward and picking up the track in front of it lifting it and moving it a couple of feet to the side then moving along that track and doing the same thing a little bit further on and on and on but John Stevens didn't stay to execute his brilliant plan of attack as soon as he had organized the canal excavations the headstrong Railroader abruptly quit he basically said that the difficult work was in the organization and the design and that the construction itself was no big deal and and once it became nothing more than just a big construction project he went elsewhere he went off to Russia to find new challenges Stevens departure infuriated President Theodore Roosevelt the president turned the job of digging the canal over to Army Colonel George W Goethals said Roosevelt he can't quit unless I order him to second in his class at West Point Goethals had distinguished himself in the Army Corps of Engineers he would use his absolute authority to weld America's canal diggers into a perfectly disciplined human machine he immediately put the whole canal zone under martial law and therefore could decree what had to occur he didn't have to convince he didn't have to argue in 1908 Goethals decreed that the canal channel would be a full fifty percent wider than Stephens had planned it once again men and machines assaulted the Culebra cut leading the attack were sixty-eight of the biggest earthmoving machines ever built giant 95 ton steam shovels made by the Milwaukee firm of boo Cyrus each of these iron leviathans could scoop up eight tons of dirt more than three times the capacity of the steam shovels used by the French the gigantic shovels dug day and night into the Continental Divide filling a carload of dirt every few minutes and day after day the explosions never ceased four hundred thousand pounds of dynamite and eight hundred blasts every month under George Goethals relentless assault Culebra cut deep into 350 feet at the time the largest excavation ever made in the surface of the earth tourists flocked to Panama and stared in odd the mighty work before them two people living at the time building the Panama Canal was a sign of progress it was a clear evidence of the advantages the industrial advantages of the political advantages of the United States over all other countries it was clear to them that we were opening up a new newer and a better world all the time and that things could only get better and even larger but the Panamanian soil would not yield to progress without a bitter fight huge landslides engulfed equipment and mangled railroad track in minutes months of digging disappeared miraculously landslides killed only a few of the 6,000 men working in the Culebra cut dynamite was a different story the blasting crews were mostly black laborers recruited from Caribbean islands they did the most dangerous work of all no one was sure how much dynamite was needed to blast the cut every explosion was a matter of trial and error when there was an error men paid with their lives [Music] in the worst single accident 23 men were killed when a massive dynamite charge went off prematurely [Music] a worker from the West Indies recalled the flesh of men flew through the air like birds the Culebra cut took nine years to complete longer than any other phase of the canals construction but the battle between man and the isthmus continues to this day today's canal engineers have new weapons in their war against the ever-shifting earth using satellites and global positioning systems they track earth movements with pinpoint precision but predicting landslides is not the same as preventing them engineers doubt that their battle with Panama will ever end Nature has thrown many obstacles in the canals path Culebra cut was only the first conquering these challenges would make engineering history when American engineers began digging in Panama they had to decide whether to build a sea-level or a lock canal because it gets its water from the ocean a sea-level canal must be as deep as sea level but in the mountains of Panama sea level is over 500 feet deep so the Americans rejected the French idea of digging the sea level they plan to use locks to raise ships 85 feet above the sea but building a lock canal created a new problem to be solved engineers would have to design and build locks capable of raising ships 85 feet no canal had ever lifted ships that high [Music] in theory the locks would need immensely powerful pumps to raise water and ships 85 feet against the force of gravity but the canal builders had no intention of struggling against gravity they decided to make gravity work for them most brilliant aspect of the design of the locks are all the water that flows into them and out of them is basically gravity flow which means that they don't need pumps to exploit the force of downward flowing water canal engineers first had to capture it in Panama that was easier said than done since time immemorial tropical downpours have soak the Isthmus of Panama over 10 feet of rain can fall in a single year bloated by this immense rainfall the Chagas River once roared unrestrained across central Panama from the mountains to the sea wreaking havoc with its devastating floods engineers knew that there could be no Panama Canal until they attained the chakras they calculated that to control the raging river they would have to build an earthen dam 100 feet high and a mile and a half wide the largest dam of its time it was a bold design and highly controversial 17 years earlier in 1889 one of America's largest earthen dams had collapsed after heavy rains moving with the force of Niagara Falls a 40-foot wall of water swept through the nearby city of Johnstown Pennsylvania two thousand people drowned Johnstown was annihilated fearing another johnstown some Americans question the wisdom of building the world's largest earthen dam in a country plagued by torrential rains but canal engineers insisted that their dam would hold begun in 1906 gotten dam was finished in 1913 behind its massive wall the chakras spread out and drowned 164 square miles of jungle creating gotten lake at the time the largest man-made lake in the world 23 miles long the lake provided nearly half the length of the canal and gave the locks the immense amount of water they needed to operate the Charles River was really the lifeblood of the whole canal and it still is today it provides the water for the whole system bringing it in at the summit of the canal and guiding it down through the locks until it flows into the oceans because gotten lake is 85 feet above sea level the force of gravity propels its water downhill toward the sea but the canals three sets of locks gotten locks on the Atlantic Pedro Miguel and miraflores on the pacific act like plugs in a gigantic bathtub preventing the lakes trillions of gallons of water from reaching sea level to raise and lower vessels the lock operators need only to open and close a series of valves water seeking sea level flows into or out of the chambers raising or lowering ships as it goes it takes 26 million gallons of water to raise one ship and another 26 million to lower it enough water to meet the needs of a large city for two days to handle this enormous amount of water and accommodate the biggest ships afloat canal engineers would design the largest concrete structures of their time so massive that no one was sure they could be built the Panama canal's locks are so well designed that today's enormous ships can still travel safely through them with only inches to spare before any ship ventures into a lock Canal workers tether it to four electric locomotives called mules which travel on either side of the lock on a high voltage rail as the ship moves through the lock a canal pilot on board tells the mule drivers when to reel in or let out cable like fishermen playing an enormous Marlin the locomotives keep the ship from hitting the lock walls it's a system that works as well today as it did in 1909 when canal engineers designed the lock chambers specifically to fit the two biggest ships in the world one of those ships was the brand-new battleship Pennsylvania 97 feet wide and 600 feet long the other was a British luxury liner in her first days of construction [Music] when finished she would be 883 feet long and 93 feet wide the biggest passenger ship afloat although the locks were designed for her she never sailed through the Panama Canal her name RMS Titanic to accommodate the Titanic the locked chambers would have to be the largest concrete structures in history each one 110 feet wide and 81 feet tall higher than a six-story building even today if stood on its end a single lock would be the fourth-tallest structure on the Manhattan skyline topped only by the Empire State and Chrysler buildings and the World Trade Center only when the locks are drained for repairs can we appreciate their awesome dimensions and understand why those who witness their construction compared them to great cathedrals never had concrete been poured on such a massive scale no one was absolutely sure that it could the problem with casting concrete in massive amounts is that concrete is an exothermic material in other words it gives off heat as it hardens so the hotter it gets the more danger there is for the material to crack and the more volume you have the more dangerous it gets for things to crack - there were other problems engineers were unsure exactly what mixture of gravel sand and water made for the strongest concrete if they poured it too late after mixing it would set him properly most difficult of all building with concrete then every detail of the lock had to be preformed in huge wood and metal molds the lock chambers would have to be cast like enormous concrete pottery to succeed the canal builders had to do something never done before pour millions of cubic yards of concrete with absolute precision and perfect timing it seemed impossible but for the men who built the Panama Canal impossible was not an option engineers stretched steel cable between giant movable towers from the cable hung enormous buckets each holding six tons of freshly mixed concrete the towers traveled back and forth over the building site pouring concrete as they went the cable cranes were made of two very large towers mounted on tracks that could travel along the axis of the Panama Canal they transported the dirt away that transported the concrete in they were very flexible because they could move in three dimensions they could move along the canal axis and across the canal at the same time in two years using this system the Canal builders poured four and a half million cubic yards of concrete a volume equal to building a solid wall eight feet thick 12 feet high and nearly 300 miles long today Computers control concrete pouring but we still build huge concrete structures with the techniques and equipment invented for the Panama Canal the lock designers topped their concrete pouring triumph with yet another dazzling innovation in the age of nuclear power it's hard to imagine how electricity could have amazed our great-grandparents but at the beginning of the 20th century it was the cutting-edge of energy technology electricity was a brand-new energy form Edison had built the first electric generating plant in 1881 and this was just about 20 to 30 years after that I don't think that electricity had been used on a building site in quite that extent before unlike steam power electricity was instant and precise with a touch of a button it turned on or off in the blinking of an eye it traveled through long wires to start compact motors that drove immense machines huge turbines turned by the force of the chakras River powered 1500 electric motors which ran the locks of the Panama Canal an industrial world that ran on steam and animal muscle was deeply impressed the Panama Canal showed what the new electric power could do with concrete poured and electricity in place only one challenge remained for the lock builders the chamber gates these gates had to be strong enough to hold back millions of gallons of water to fit the world's largest locked chambers they had to be the biggest lock gates ever built as tall as six story buildings to remain watertight the gates needed to open and close with flawless precision in short they had to be engineering miracles massively strong yet light his feathers and they were on dry land each lock gate weighs 700 tonnes in water it floats the buoyant hollow frame makes the gate lighter than water this is a very important feature of the design of the other lock gates because this means that the machinery that is necessary to open and close them doesn't have to move a very heavy massive steel gate but really only has to move something that is buoyant in the water massive steel rods open and close each gate moving the rods are huge gear wheels 20 feet in diameter yet incredibly the whole system runs on a single 40 horsepower electric motor no more powerful than a motorcycle engine when the gates were finished engineers tried opening and closing them in the dry locked chambers at their full weight one observer noted that each 2 million pound gate swung as easily as an ordinary door gravity was the heart of the logs electricity was their nervous system Engineers gave them a brain the control board today the original Control board's built in 1913 still run the locks each board is a tabletop model of the entire lock operation but unlike a real brain it cannot make mistakes as lock operators turn its valve handles letting water in and out of chambers opening and closing gates the entire lock operation unfolds in miniature before their eyes everything must happen in correct sequence beneath the board controls are ingeniously interconnected no one can throw a switch or turn a valve out of order if they do the lock operation stops the lock system had a whole series of failsafe devices was more like the organization of a military campaign where each module fit exactly into another organizational module until the whole thing could work if any piece were left out if any step were left out in the organization of how to open and shut these gates how to move ships through the canal it wouldn't work it would shut down after four years of construction the locks were finished by then the Panama Canal was finally nearing completion in May 1913 two steam shovels met nose to nose in Culebra cut and excavated the last few buckets of soil the canal was finished all it needed was water on October 10th in Washington DC President Woodrow Wilson pressed a button setting off an explosion 3,000 miles away in Panama [Music] hundreds of dynamite charges blew the final yards of Earth sky-high water from gotten Lake rushed into the Culebra cut but the Panama Canal had been dug as much for strategic military purposes as for commercial shipping reasons once finished it would become one of America's key military assets and one of its most vulnerable targets on August 15 1914 the USS Ann Khan was the first ship to pass through the Panama Canal a dream hundreds of years old had come to pass six months ahead of schedule and four percent under budget [Music] but it was a dream with a staggering price in ten years the United States spent 352 million dollars to build the Panama Canal five times more than America had spent on the Louisiana Purchase and all other territorial acquisitions combined the cost in human lives was no less cheap more than 5,000 American deaths nearly 25,000 French 500 lives lost for every mile the canal builders had carried out one of history's greatest construction projects and could only wonder if their accomplishment would stand the test of time they could not know that within 50 years the Panama Canal would face a deadly peril at the end of World War two the crew of an American warship in the Pacific were astonished to see what appeared to be a prehistoric monster rising from the deep in fact it was a Japanese submarine 400 feet long the largest underwater vessel of its time the e 400 series submarines are something that the world has never seen sense or or even before these were gigantic submarines they had a displacement of four thousand four hundred and fifty tons which was all almost twice the size of the largest American submarine so this is quite an impressive machine examining the subs American sailors discovered a strange tube and a long metal track the Japanese explained that the tube was actually an airplane hangar ingeniously designed to hold sea planes called sere arns like aeronautical origami the seiran's literally folded into their tubular homes once on the surface the subs would launch their planes by catapulting them off their decks the top-secret aircraft had been designed to perform only one mission destroy the Panama Canal the attack plan called for a fleet of 18 giant subs to launch tense iran sea planes off the Panamanian coast the planes bombs and torpedoes would hit the canals weakest points got tuned damn and the locked gates with its dam and gates destroyed the canal would have drained like an unplugged bathtub crippling America's ability to move men and ships between two theatres of war but in the early days of the war aware of the canals vulnerability the US military put into action a secret plan of its own 100 feet under the locks a maze of tunnels led to special items project 7 sip 7 for short sips Evan was too enormous hydraulic jacks each weighing 100 tons supporting a massive slab of steel hidden underground this film offers a rare glimpse of sip 7 in action pushed upward by the underground jacks the huge steel dam rises in a lock capable of holding back trillions of gallons of water if bombs ever shattered the lock gates World War two ended before Japan could launch its attack against the Panama Canal instead it's giant subs ended up his target practice for the US Navy today the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC is restoring the last of the Panama Canal bombers thus Iran aircraft are the only submarine based airplanes ever designed and put in operation that were intended as an offensive weapon thus Iran that we have here in this museum is the only clue left in the world of this weapon system and we're very proud to have this because of the threat that it did show against the Panama Canal and what could have been done [Music] [Music] at the close of the 20th century much has changed at the Panama Canal the technology of the future works side by side with the innovations of the past [Music] [Music] veteran canal pilots use state-of-the-art computer simulations to teach trainees how to avoid catastrophe because you have to keep in mind the hydrodynamic effects you know the interaction between the two ships today the biggest ships using the canal are called Panamax vessels Panamax ships are over 950 feet long and over 100 feet wide the lock chambers are 1,000 feet long and 110 feet wide there's literally no room for error you do a good job entering the locks and you can see the face of the master right away with a big smile and if you don't then you see him looking the other way you know and that's perhaps your biggest punishment the world is changing too beyond anything that canal builders could have imagined the largest of today's super tankers and aircraft carriers are too big for the locks there's talk of building high-speed railroads across Central America to compete with the canal but as the year 2000 approaches and the canal passes from American to Panamanian ownership this superstructure that once astonished the world continues to serve it well since the canal opened in 1914 nearly 800,000 ships have passed through it carrying over 5 billion tons of cargo oil wheat computers automobiles and vacationers flow perpetually through its 50-mile channel 15,000 ships a year 24 hours a day seven days a week 365 days a year as the 20th century ends no one expects the Panama Canal to fade into history god I tell you I admire those people who build this thing sometimes you go through the canal and and and and you concentrate it on the job and you don't think about it but then once in a while you have a passenger for example on a ship that asks you something about the canal and then you start talking about it and then you look at one of the hills and and and then you you feel this incredible admiration for these people here nearly 100 years ago human beings took on one of nature's greatest challenges and won whatever its future holds the Panama Canal will always be a monument to that victory it will forever commemorate the genius spirit and raw determination which triumph so decisively over such incredible odds [Music] you

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Id: 5poLlLyoC2k

Length: 51min 40sec (3100 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 27 2019