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“Panama” by Van Halen is a great song. The Panama Canal is a great feat of engineering. And a pretty big fucking deal, because otherwise you had to go around an entire continent, and sailing that southern tip had a tendency to kill people. Speaking of killing people . . .
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: October 10, 1913--
The Isthmus of Panama was turned into a canal, no thanks to the French. They tried in 1881 but gave up 13 years later because they kept having engineering problems and workers-dying problems. Not just from accidents, but the tropics are known for tropical diseases, and after 22,000 deaths the French said fuck it and bugged out.
Nine years later the U.S. was all “we can do this no matter how many people have to die.” And so they did. In order to make it happen there was this whole problem with Panama being part of Colombia and Colombia saying no fucking way. So, the U.S. sent in warships to support the Panamanian rebels who said, “We’re gonna be our own fucking country, pendejos,” and that’s what they did. Panama declared independence in late 1903 and the U.S. was right there with the acknowledging of it, “We got you, fam; strings attached tho.”
The strings were a treaty that gave the U.S. control over building, indefinitely administering, and defending the canal. Basically, a violation of the new nation’s sovereignty. But we’re bigger than you so suck it. Panama was a U.S. protectorate until 1939.
The U.S. began construction and had learned from the French failures, implementing a massive sanitation and mosquito killin’ project to save workers’ lives. Still, over the next decade another 5,600 died from disease and accidents.
Over 50 miles long, The Panama Canal has been named one of the seven wonders of the modern world by the American Society of Civil Engineers. The big day for “this day in history” was October 10, 1913. That’s when President Wilson sent a signal from the White House via telegraph that triggered a big kaboom. The explosion destroyed the Gamboa Dike—which is what it was supposed to do—and flooded the Culebra Cut, joining the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans together for the first time via the canal.
The canal was formally opened 10 months later. To this day it remains one of the largest and most challenging engineering projects ever undertaken.
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