Culebra Cut began to look like a finished job, with only a little hump in the middle mile to be taken off. Then one night, while the canal army was asleep, she poured down into the south end of the cut an avalanche of material that filled it up to the 67-foot level, bottled up the railroad exits from that end, and did sundry other evil things to the plans of the engineers (see page 146).

When I heard about it I went up to Culebra to talk with Colonel Goethals as to its bearing on the immediate future. After passing the time of day I asked him how he was, to which he replied:

"Well, about the best way I can express it is to say that I am home-sick.' Cucaracha looks bad, but she is not by any means the greatest of my woes. I trampled over her this morning, and the basalt dikes that are peeping out seem to indicate that she will be 'dead' before very long. But over here on this side of the cut," pointing out the window of his office as he spoke, "there is beginning to show an indication of a new break, and if the actualities prove as bad as the indications suggest, it will outdo anything we have had to contend with yet."

And as he spoke I saw the tears well up in the eyes of that man of iron, and I understood what those slides were costing him. I knew then whence had gone that buoyancy of youth which I had met in 1908 and that enthusiasm of purpose which I had seen in 1910. Now instead there was the grim determination of a veteran of a thousand conflicts, who would fight on to the end only because Duty's voice ever spoke louder in his ear than Pleasure's.

NO ONE COULD FORETELL THE SLIDES

The determined character of the slides that beset the canal engineers is strikingly shown by the amount of their material that had to be removed in comparison with the total excavations for each year. Prior to 1910 they presented no serious obstacle, since the canal was not deep enough to create the unbalanced condition necessary for their development. Up to that year the excavations on account of slides were only 7.87 per cent of the total excavations.

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During 1910, however, they became more active, and seven weeks out of the 52 would have been required to take care of the 14.83 per cent of all excavations which_represented the slide debris taken out. In 1911 there was a still greater activity in slides, and, omitting the extra difficulties they imposed, it required 13 weeks to take out the material they brought into the cut, this material amounting to 26.30 per cent of the total excavations for the year.

The succeeding year saw the cut going still deeper and the slides growing larger and still more bothersome, so that 34.5 per cent of the excavations of that year were of slide material, whose removal required 18 weeks.

During the year 1913 the cut approached final grade and the slides set a new record, requiring 46 per cent of the total excavations for the year, which accounts for 24 weeks' work.

The present year, beginning July 1, 1913, saw only two months required for the final bottom to be reached in the cut, outside of the material brought in by the slides, so that at least 44 weeks of this year are chargeable against the slides.

SLIDES HAVE DELAYED THE COMPLETION OF THE CUT BY 22 MONTHS

From all this it must appear that the bare work of removing the material from the cut brought into it by the slides, leaving entirely out of the reckoning the immense handicap in the prosecution of the regular work that they involved, held back the completion of the cut by 22 months at least.

It is certainly reasonable to suppose that all the delays the slides imposed held up the work by eight months, so that but for them we might have seen a cut through Culebra Mountain, with a bottom width of 300 feet, completed by January 1, 1912, in five years; whereas the most conservative estimate had set down eight and a half years to make a cut with a bottom width of 200 feet. a matter of fact, the amount of material that was contained in the cut as originally planned, 53.800,000 cubic yards, was removed before the end of the calendar year 1910, or in less than four

As

years of actual work and at a total cost of about 50 million dollars.

One of the wonderful things about the building of the canal was how, in the face of all the unforeseen difficulties that the slide problem involved, Colonel Goethals and Colonel Gaillard were able to drive down unit cost as the mercury in the difficulty thermometer sped upward. In 1908 it was estimated that the cost of removing a yard of spoil would be around 98 cents for the whole cut.

For the fiscal year 1909 they hammered this cost down to 783 cents; the next year they lowered it to 735% cents; in 1911, although the slide problem became much more acute, they forced it still lower-to 633 cents.

But they were not satisfied even then; 1912 saw the slides more troublesome than ever, and in spite of this they forced

the unit cost down to 543% cents. Than this, there is no prouder showing in the history of business economy or of engineering.

Even in 1913, with the slides requiring nearly half of all the work and imposing unprecedented difficulties upon the engineers, they managed to hold down the yardage cost to 59 cents. And that is why they were able to save 20 cents on every one of the 107 million cubic yards taken out of the Central Division up to July 1, 1913-enough in the aggregate to finance the removal of all the slides, with a handsome little nest-egg left over.

DIFFERENT VARIETIES OF SLIDES

The slides with which the canal engineers have had to deal in solving the problems of Culebra Cut are of four classes. The most troublesome of these

are, more properly speaking, structural breaks.

As the big ditch neared final grade the depth was so great that the downward pressure from the top of the embankment forced the weak rock at the bottom to crumble, and this led to great fissures in the ground back some distance from the edge of the embankment. These would gradually widen, and the material would sweep downward and outward and upward into the bottom of the canal, often raising the bottom 10 to 20 feet higher than it was a few hours before.

The great slide on the west bank at Culebra, covering some 75 acres of ground and involving millions of cubic yards of material, is the best example of this kind of slide. Nearly half of all the sliding material on the canal strip was embraced in this great movement.

It began in 1907, and during the more than six years of its activity it required the dismantling and removal of half of the village of Culebra to keep out of its way. Now it was the American living quarters that had to go; now it was the big Y. M. C. A. club house, after being shored up repeatedly in the hope of saving it; now it was the penitentiary, and so on. If the cut had gone much deeper it might have been the very Administration Building itself that would have been next to go.

THE FAMOUS CUCARACHA SLIDE

The other principal type of slide is represented by Cucaracha, a mass of soft earth with no rock reaching down deep enough or holding strong enough to keep it from sliding in, slipping across smooth surface beneath it.

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Cucaracha scared out the French. It is said that when they were working along at her toe and she began to give them a tropical imitation of a glacier sliding down into a stream, they saw their visions of a sea-level canal disappearing into the realms of impossibility. At any rate, they promptly quit excavating at the bottom of Cucaracha and left her as a problem for the Americans; and a problem she declared herself to them back as far as 1905.

Cucaracha has been like the poor-a

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problem always with the canal engineers. Every time they got a little nearer toward the final bottom of the cut, Cucaracha would take a fresh slide, sometimes shooting millions of yards of material down the embankment and across the cut with such force that her toe would turn to the opposite bank, some 60 feet or more (see page 146). She kept this up in season and out, bottling up the south end of the cut, and so preventing the work from going forward that Colonel Goethals finally determined to let the water in and to dredge her out. He is now inviting her to do her very worst. He has a dredging fleet ready to take her out as fast as she comes in, and it now looks as if she has slid until she can slide no more (see page 148).

Meanwhile Colonel Goethals, in keeping with a suggestion made by Division Engineer Cole, decided to attack Cucaracha in the rear. She had slid and kept a-sliding until she went away back past the summit of the hill, and so it was decided to sluice off all the material that would drain away from the canal.

The plan worked well, and Cucaracha, in her final struggle against the engineers, finds herself beset before and behind, and soon she will become a thing of the past forever. But during her unremitting fight she has shut up Culebra Cut dozens of times, has brought 50 acres of ground, scenery and all, into the cut, and has required the removal of some eight or nine million cubic yards of material.

Fortunately the two great hills, Gold Hill and Contractor's Hill, stand like Gibraltars, and rear their heads proudly above the majestic scene below. They seem to be of solid rock wherever there might be danger of slides if they were not. Gold Hill is flanked by Cucaracha on the south and by East Culebra slide on the north, but has never given any sign of wanting to join the flowing procession into the cut. It rises 652 feet above the sea and is the highest hill in the canal region.

HOW THE MOUNTAIN CAME TO
MOHAMMED

The slides have played many fantastic tricks in the course of the construction