The Panama Canal: An ocean-to-ocean cutting with multiple side effects

Since the time soil mechanics became a science in its own right, a lot of precious information has come from the accounts of near disasters in engineering. Who now recalls the construction of the Panama Canal? The first attempt led to a financial crash in France, whose engineers set out to dig the most difficult of the world’s canals, a deep and unstable cutting through a hostile landscape. It proved a bottomless pit for the small subscriber before eventually turning out, for the Americans who subsequently took over, an extremely profitable investment. It is one of the greatest marks that man has left on the earth’s surface, a major monument of international civil engineering-and hence of particular interest to us.