Now and Then At left, Panama is building a new, 570,000-square-foot convention center on the Amador Causeway; above, Panama City’s his- toric Old Quarter.

FROM SEA TO SHINING SEA “Big” is a word that naturally attaches itself to the Panama Canal, the massively ambitious waterway that connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The project was begun in 1881 by the French, who largely abandoned it eight years later, exhausted from their attempts to cut a 50-mile-long, 30-foot- deep, sea-level passage through the mosquito- infested jungles and landslide-prone mountains of the Isthmus of Panama, in what was then part of Colombia. More than 22,000 laborers died — from floods, accidents, and, especially, yellow fever and malaria. The United States took control of the proj- ect in May 1904 — literally, after backing a rebel- lion against Colombia by Panamanian separatists, resulting in the creation of the Republic of Panama and the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone, which was only turned back over to Panama in 1999. The first chief engineer on the U.S. project,

Wallace, formerly the chief engineer and general manager of the Illinois Central Railroad, lasted 13 months. He “seemed, almost from the beginning, defeated by the job and by the climate and terrain,” Julie Greene writes in The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal. “He saw the unhappiness of workers, their constant flight back to the United States, and accurately evalu- ated the problem: not only were the men worried

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about yellow fever, but they felt that housing was inadequate, amusements and diversions were nonexistent, and food prices were much too high. And they were homesick.” Wallace’s successor, Stevens, was also a railroad man, with stints as chief engineer and general manager of the Great Northern Railway and as vice president of the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railroad. He made it 20 months as the canal’s chief engineer, but in that time had an enormous influence on the project, overhauling its railway system and successfully lobbying Presi- dent Theodore Roosevelt to switch construction from a sea-level canal to a lock-based canal, which would use a series of dams and locks to raise ships to a 163-square-mile artificial lake 85 feet above sea level for passage through the isthmus. Stevens resigned in 1907 and was replaced

by Col. George Washington Goethals, never a president of ASCE but a distinguished military officer who served with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and who saw the project through to its completion in 1914. And while the U.S. team, led by chief sanitary officer William Gorgas, was able to nearly eradicate yellow fever and malaria by zeroing in on mosquitos as carriers of the diseases, about 5,600 workers still died during the 10-year, $375-million project.

SEPTEMBER 2013 PCMA CONVENE 59