The Panama Canal: The Engineering Marvel That Required Moving an Entire Mountain and Cost Tens of Thousands of Lives

I knew the Panama Canal existed and roughly what it did. What I did not know, until I actually read about it, was that the French tried first and killed over 22,000 workers in the process. Or that the mountain the Americans eventually blasted through kept sliding back into the hole they dug, for years, like it was making a point. Or that the engineer overseeing the most dangerous section described it as never silent for seven consecutive years. Not for a single hour.

“Built the Panama Canal” is doing a lot of work as a sentence. Here is what it actually meant.

Why It Took Two Countries and Thirty Years

The Spanish crown commissioned the first study of a canal route through Panama in 1534. Nothing happened for about 340 years.

In 1880, a French company led by Ferdinand de Lesseps, fresh off his success with the Suez Canal, started digging. De Lesseps made one catastrophic assumption: he planned a sea-level canal, no locks, the way Suez worked. Suez was flat. Panama was not. Panama had a mountain range running through its middle, a river that flooded unpredictably, and a tropical climate that was not adequately represented in any of the planning documents. Yellow fever and malaria killed workers at extraordinary rates. The rainy season dissolved the excavations. The company ran out of money. In 1889 it went bankrupt. Somewhere between 20,000 and 22,000 workers had died, mostly from disease.

The United States bought the French equipment and rights for $40 million in 1904 and started over. The first chief engineer lasted 18 months before his nerve broke and he quit. His replacement spent most of his tenure building housing and sanitation infrastructure before he too abruptly resigned, leaving a furious Theodore Roosevelt to appoint an Army Corps engineer named George Goethals who finished the job.

The Culebra Cut

The Culebra Cut, now called the Gaillard Cut, is the section that nearly broke the project completely.

The Continental Divide ran directly across the canal route. Workers had to blast and dig through nine miles of mountain, lowering the summit of the cut from 194 feet above sea level to 40 feet, wide enough for ships to pass. They used approximately 60 million pounds of dynamite. At peak excavation, up to 6,000 men worked the cut around the clock in rotating shifts, in tropical heat, surrounded by active dynamite charges and unpredictable machinery. The problem, other than the obvious ones, was that the mountain kept coming back.

The cut was flanked by unstable clay slopes that had been saturated by decades of tropical rainfall. As workers dug deeper and removed material, the slopes destabilized and slid in. Not quickly, in most cases. The engineer overseeing the cut, David Gaillard, described the slides as “tropical glaciers, made of mud instead of ice.” They moved slowly, continuously, and could reverse weeks of excavation in a single day. The canal experienced over 100 major slides between 1907 and 1914. Some came without warning, burying workers and machinery simultaneously. One 1913 slide brought 23 million additional cubic yards of material into a section that had already been excavated.

For seven years Culebra Cut was never silent, not even for an hour. That quote is from historian David McCullough. I keep thinking about what it implies for the people who worked there.

The Workers Nobody Talks About

The official US government count recorded roughly 5,600 deaths during the American construction phase from 1904 to 1913. Most historians believe the actual number was significantly higher, since deaths of West Indian contract workers were tracked less rigorously than deaths of American employees.

About two-thirds of the workforce came from the Caribbean, primarily Barbados and Jamaica. They received lower wages than American workers for the same work, lived in segregated facilities, and had essentially no legal protections. When workers lost limbs to accidents, the chief engineer George Goethals reportedly told affected families that Congress had passed no law requiring compensation. He noted that injured workers would be taken care of “as soon as they were able to work, even in a wheelchair.”

Yellow fever killed hundreds before sanitation engineer William Gorgas implemented a mosquito eradication program that eventually brought the disease under control by 1905. Malaria remained a chronic killer throughout construction. Accidents involving dynamite, landslides, trains, and equipment killed additional workers every day. One December 1908 explosion killed 23 workers when machinery accidentally ignited unexploded dynamite charges.

A worker named Antonio Sanchez described working in the excavation as going to a battlefield every day. The comparison was not hyperbole.

What They Built

The final canal runs 51 miles across the Isthmus of Panama, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Ships do not travel at sea level. The canal lifts ships 85 feet above sea level using a system of locks, then lowers them back down on the other side. Gatun Lake, created by damming the Chagres River, was the largest artificial lake in the world at the time of its creation in 1913.

The Culebra Cut took 240 million cubic yards of excavated material out of the mountain over the American construction phase, plus the additional material that slid back in from the unstable slopes. Moving all of it required the largest railroad operation in Western Hemisphere history at the time. Workers moved approximately 160 train carloads of material every hour at peak excavation.

On October 10, 1913, President Woodrow Wilson pressed a telegraph key in the White House that triggered the explosion of the Gamboa Dike, flooding the last dry section of the cut. Two steam shovels had already met in the middle from opposite ends weeks earlier. The canal opened officially on August 15, 1914. The opening ceremony was scaled back because World War I had just started.

Total cost: over $350 million, the most expensive construction project in US history to that point. Total deaths: unknown with certainty, but somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 across the French and American phases combined.

What Changed

Before the canal, a ship traveling from New York to San Francisco had to round Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America, a journey of roughly 13,000 miles. The canal reduced that to about 5,000 miles. The trade implications were immediate and permanent. Global shipping patterns restructured around the new route. The US strategic position in both the Atlantic and Pacific simultaneously became viable in a way it had not been before.

Panama regained control of the canal in 1999 under an agreement Jimmy Carter negotiated in 1977, over considerable opposition at the time. The canal now generates over $2 billion annually for the Panamanian government.