The Panama Canal

 No trip to Panama City would be complete without a trip to the actual Panama Canal and seeing the locks.  Fortunately the locks of Panama City are just a few blocks from our hotel.

We saw locks like this in Florence, Italy and then also downtown in Austin, so I guess it is now a world wide practice.

But the canal locks are further away.  So we took a bus and boarded the Pacific Queen sitting at a dock in the canal.

The boat took us out into the canal.  The canal looked like a river, with lots of ship traffic.  And the ships were big.  Container ships.

But at points the banks were clearly man-made, and the whole thing seemed very linear and regular.

Back in the late 1800’s, spurred on by the California gold rush and other needs to get from the U.S. Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast, the decision was made to build a canal.  France tried it first.  They were successful with the Suez Canal, and so attempted the Panama Canal.  But the situation was much worse.  Disease — especially malaria and yellow fever from the mosquitos (altho the French did not know this), and the different soil (lots of hard volcanic rock) doomed their project.  Plus, like the Suez, they envisioned a sea-level canal.  The U.S. was more motivated — it was the U.S. east and west coasts that would benefit most.  And being somewhat later malaria was better understood.  But they also decided that a sea-level canal was too difficult.  So they designed a higher canal, with locks to allow the ships to go up, across, and then down from one side to the other.

A lock is a simple concept.  You have a higher and lower elevation section of the canal, with the lock in between them.  The lock has two massive doors, one in front and one in back. (And actually each “door” is a double-door, so really two sets of doors.)  From the higher elevation, you open the back door while keeping the front door closed and the water level between the doors raises to match the higher level.  The ship moves into the space between the doors.  Then the back door closes.  The water is allowed to drain out of the space between the doors until it is level with the lower section, the front door is opened and the ship sails out.  Going back is the same idea, but once the ship is between the two doors, water is allowed to flow into the space between from the higher level until the two are the same level, and then the door is opened. 

Obviously, you could use the locks more efficiently by letting one ship come down and then another go back up as the locks emptied and filled, but the guide said that there really isn’t room for two of the big ships to travel by each other in the canal, so they let traffic go one way in the morning and the other way in the afternoon.  They do try to fill up the lock if they have small boats and large boats.  So when we went, there was a sailboat and a container ship with us.

The whole process of going thru the locks takes time, but is very smooth.  Here we are before the lock let us down

And here we are after the lock has let the water out and they are about to open the lower door (which is behind us in the picture, and the back door is behind the large ship).  Note basically that the wall on the side of the lock is just much taller.

Opening the door:

So once you get the idea of the locks, then the problem is just managing the levels of the water.  The ends of the canal at the Pacific and the Atlantic are just the sea level on each side.  For most of the rest of the canal, they built a dam on a major river — the Gatun River,  The Gatun Dam created a massive Gatun Lake behind it (think how the Hoover Dam created the huge Lake Mead) which flooded like half the country (maybe not) and meant that the rest of the canal was much less work.  So the work was the Gatun Dam and a set of locks on the Caribbean side at Colon, then more locks on the Pacific side (at Panama City) and some digging in between where the lake didn’t quite do the trick.

To top off our day, having exited the locks and heading out towards the Pacific Ocean to return to the docks of Panama City, a massive thunderstorm came up.  It was raining so hard you couldn’t see the banks on either side of the canal.

Most people went down below, where there were windows to keep out the rain, and we proceeded until we got to the Pacific Ocean, where the weather cleared up, it stopped raining and we pulled into the harbor and back on a bus to go back to the hotels.  Our guides pointed out that the rain is what fills up the canal and makes the whole thing work.  And we are now in the “less rainy” season.