Waterline

It took nearly four decades, the lives of some 30,000 human beings and billions of US Dollars in current values to build; it was a source for heated debates and the kiss of death to some careers; it was rooted in vision - but took ample amounts of practicality to realize. You might know it simply as The Panama Canal - in a stretch of land not wider than 70 kilometers wide, humanity saw the opportunity to connect two great oceans - the Atlantic and the Pacific - and managed to cut the route by sea from California to Europe - by half. The keystone of the canal is a dam that was the biggest ever to be built at the time - the dam near the small town of Gatun. You are invited to hear a tale about politics, engineering, money and tons of controversy, which, a century on is all but forgotten. The post Building a Dam in Gatun – On Dams (part 1) appeared first on Waterline.