This important waterway opened
for shipping traffic in 1914.
This year, the Panama Canal, one of the most important canals in the world, turned 100.
A canal is a waterway built for shipping or bringing water to crops. The Central American country of Panama owns and operates the Panama Canal. Panama is an isthmus,
which is a narrow strip of land connecting two bigger bodies of land.
The Panama Canal is only 50 miles long, but it may be the most important shortcut ever
built. That’s because it lets ships move between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. This
makes it easier and cheaper to ship cargo all over the world. Before the canal was built,
ships had to travel around Cape Horn, near the southern tip of South America. The old
route was extremely dangerous, with swirling winds and submerged icebergs. So not
only did the Panama Canal cut the length of the trip by nearly two-thirds, it made the
voyage much safer as well.
The Panama Canal is crucial to the world’s shipping economy. Every year, about 14,000
ships move through it, representing about five percent of all the cargo in the world. The
canal is especially important to Panama because every single one of these ships pays a
toll; much like drivers pay tolls to drive on some roads. This has helped Panama to have
one of the best economies in Central America.
The canal works using a series of locks.
Imagine trying to move a huge ship over a mountain and you will get an idea of what the
Panama Canal does. It works sort of like an elevator raising huge ships from sea level to
land level, and lowering them back down again. Instead of elevator cars, however, the ships
enter chambers called locks, separated on either side by gates.
When a ship enters a lock, the water level is raised, which raises the ship to the level of the
next lock. The gate is opened, and the ship moves into the next lock. The ship is pulled
through each lock by trains that run along the side of the lock. Once the ship is raised all
the way up, it moves across Panama’s natural waterways and manmade lakes. On the other
side of the isthmus, the ship again enters locks. This time, however, the locks are drained.
This lowers the ship step by step until it reaches sea level. From there, the ship moves out to
the ocean and continues its journey.
The average cargo ship takes about nine hours to make the voyage across the Panama Canal.
The canal is open for ships every day of the year, 24 hours a day. It takes 9,000 people to run
the canal and everything that is connected to it. A new set of locks is currently being built to
handle huge new ships. When these locks are finished next year, twice as much cargo will be
able to move through the Panama Canal every year.
It took 10 years to build the canal,
and longer for Panama to control it.
Although Panama now controls the canal, the U.S. built it and controlled it for
many years. In 1903, the U.S. signed a treaty with Panama to build the canal and
control it, for a yearly fee. The U.S. built the canal to unite its Atlantic and Pacific
fleets of ships. Theodore Roosevelt was president at the time the canal was started.
He felt that the U.S. needed a quick route between the oceans. President Roosevelt
often said he was more proud of the canal than anything else he did in office.
Construction of the 50-mile-long canal began in 1904 and was completed in 1914.
At many points, more than 60,000 people were all working on this project together. The workers had to dam rivers, then hurry to dig through the grainy soils.
If they didn’t hurry, these soils would quickly fill in the holes they had dug. This
was difficult work in hot and dangerous conditions, and malaria, yellow fever, and
other diseases weakened and killed many workers. Malaria and yellow fever are
spread by mosquitoes. The first two years of building the canal were devoted to
draining the swamps and clearing the brush where mosquitoes lived and laid their
eggs. Even so, thousands of workers died of these diseases.
Many Panamanians were unhappy about the U.S. controlling the canal. In the
1970s, the U.S. agreed to give Panama control of the canal on Dec. 31, 1999.
Panama now makes about $2 billion a year from canal fees.