How Plagues, Politics Nearly Sunk the Panama Canal
By Todd Seavey
Posted: Sunday, March 30, 2008

ARTICLES
Publication Date: March 30, 2008

The full text of this book review appeared on March 30, 2008 in the New York Post:

When people die in the course of building something, we inevitably ask, "Was it worth it?" Just witness all the hand-wringing after the recent crane disaster in Midtown. This is all the more complicated in the case of the Panama Canal, as Matthew Parker's "Panama Fever" makes clear. Both the costs and benefits are great enough to leave us overwhelmed at the thought of trying to sum them up.

In 1914, for the first time, the Canal opened an easy shipping route between Atlantic and Pacific, something people had dreamt of for centuries. Constructing it, though, cost some 25,000 lives -- about 500 lives for every mile of the canal.

Describing the calamities that beset the U.S.'s building of a railroad across Panama, which preceded the Canal by a half-century, Parker reports: "Setbacks continued even as the line neared completion. A 40-foot-deep cut was dug near Paraiso high in the mountains. When the first rain came, the surface became saturated and the greasy soil moved into the cut, burying the railroad to a depth of some 20 feet." Without melodrama or hyperbole, he creates a painful portrait of America's Herculean effort to master the isthmus.

It was the French, though, who would make the first attempt, in the 1880s, to dig a Panama canal. The workers, largely local mulattoes, many from nearby Jamaica, soon found themselves facing toxic snakes and hordes of mosquitoes, many carrying malaria, decades before the creation of the pesticide DDT...


See also: "DDT Ban Turns 30 -- Millions Dead of Malaria Because of Ban, More Deaths Likely"