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Rob Bell journeys along the length of the Panama Canal to learn how the unconquerable Isthmus was bent to the will and skill of determined engineers, creating one of the seven wonders of the modern world. He discovers their groundbreaking inventions and uncovers the secrets of its construction.
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00:00I'm on a journey to a world where the impossible becomes possible.
00:05Oh, this is really exciting.
00:06With exclusive access to the world's most impressive feats of engineering.
00:12Wow! It's scale, scale, scale, Richard.
00:16I'll meet desert daredevils.
00:18They'll swing out, they set off the dynamite, then swing back.
00:22And pioneers of land and sea.
00:25I mean, the proportions of these structures are just immense.
00:29Who risked it all.
00:31I'm very aware that there are things out here.
00:34When they picked him out five minutes later, he died.
00:37I'll uncover the secrets of the most extraordinary structures ever built.
00:45This time, I'm heading to the tropics.
00:48Actually, that's quite far above me now.
00:53To a superstructure made in one of the world's deadliest environments.
00:58This heavy rain that we have right now makes the whole process more complicated and challenging.
01:03In an epic struggle against natural disasters, disease and death.
01:08It could not stop malaria and yellow fever because they didn't know what was causing it.
01:12In the battle to build.
01:14The Panama Canal.
01:22At the turn of the 20th century, one of history's most difficult and challenging engineering projects took place here in
01:32Central America.
01:33It was a tale of triumph and tragedy.
01:37A battle royale between man and nature.
01:40And it resulted in one of the seven wonders of the modern world.
01:45The Panama Canal.
01:48Panama is an isthmus.
01:50A narrow strip of land.
01:51Yet it's home to one of the harshest terrains in the world.
01:55Wild jungles.
01:57Raging rivers.
01:59And deadly creatures.
02:02As early as the 16th century, global superpowers aspired to conquer this hostile land.
02:09To build a waterway that would join the world's two largest oceans.
02:14Pacific and Atlantic.
02:16To create a new, lucrative trade route that would bring east and west closer together.
02:23It made perfect sense to construct a canal across Panama.
02:28At its narrowest point, it's only 30 miles between the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean.
02:34But this shortcut looked easier on the map than in reality.
02:39Mountains would literally need to be moved.
02:42Rivers tamed.
02:45And malarial swamps cleared.
02:48But the deadly risks would bring great wealth and prosperity to its conquerors.
02:54And it's no wonder.
02:56Today, the strategic location of the canal has made it the lifeblood of global trade.
03:03Around 14,000 ships transit through here every year.
03:08Carrying a quarter of a trillion dollars worth of cargo.
03:13And the whole operation starts here.
03:16The traffic control centre.
03:22This place is brilliant.
03:25My gosh, there's a lot going on.
03:27Hey, is it Matthew?
03:28Hey, how are you doing?
03:30Oh, Matthew, it's very good to meet you.
03:31Nice to meet you too. How are you doing?
03:32I'm trying to take this all in.
03:35Everyone's screens are all up.
03:36People all look very busy.
03:38There's a lot of action going on.
03:40If the Panama Canal was a body, this would be the brain.
03:42So everything is coordinated here.
03:45We are in constant communication with the ships.
03:48There's a lot of pressure that we do things correctly.
03:52How many ships are there then?
03:53Today, we have like 37 ships.
03:55The average per day is between 36 to 40 ships per day.
04:00When that vessel decides to transit, we put them in the schedule.
04:05That's what we're looking at.
04:05We're looking at a schedule of all the ships that are going in one direction.
04:10And all these screens at the top here, have you got the whole canal covered with videos?
04:14Yes.
04:15We have about 60 different cameras so that we can keep track of the movements of ships throughout the canal
04:20from beginning to the end.
04:22I mean, if we picked one ship, for example, what kind of information have we got on it?
04:28Sure.
04:28That's the Triton.
04:29And we can see that ship on the camera.
04:32That's Triton here?
04:33That's the Triton right there.
04:34And that is the biggest ship that transits the canal today.
04:38How big is it?
04:39It says there it's 1,210 feet in length and 167 feet in beam.
04:46That's the width, right?
04:47That's the width.
04:48So that ship carries approximately 16,000 containers on board.
04:53And you must have these container ships that are transporting all sorts of different goods from all places in the
05:01world going to all other places in the world.
05:04If ships weren't able to come through here suddenly, global trade would be…
05:08In ruins?
05:09Yes.
05:11It's amazing, Matthew.
05:12It is so good to see this.
05:14You get a sense of just how important this 50-mile stretch of water is to the global economy, to
05:22how the world works.
05:23It is.
05:24It is.
05:25It is.
05:30In the 19th century, the unattainable dream began to look possible with the rise of the Industrial Revolution.
05:37An era of huge engineering and technological leaps.
05:44One of its significant achievements was Egypt's Suez Canal, which was built by the French.
05:51Confident and in high spirits following this success, they turned their attention to Panama.
05:58They began digging the canal in 1881.
06:01And even though it would be much smaller than Suez, they soon realized that the isthmus was a completely different
06:08beast.
06:13You are digging through big mountains and so the amount of spoil you would have to dig out to make
06:19a sea level canal from ocean to ocean was immense.
06:22And of course, you also had disease.
06:24Yellow fever and malaria became the biggest obstacles for the French and decimated the workforce.
06:33Even though the French took lots of measures to have sanitation and hygiene, they could not stop malaria and yellow
06:40fever because they didn't know what was causing it.
06:42It was an incredibly expensive endeavor at that time and it essentially, it nearly bankrupted France.
06:49After eight years of work, the French had only managed to excavate 11 miles of canal.
06:56And the human and financial costs were mounting.
07:00A staggering 22,000 construction workers had lost their lives, mainly from disease.
07:07And having spent almost 300 million dollars, the company had no choice but to abandon the project.
07:14But where the French had failed, the Americans saw opportunity.
07:20In 1901, US President Theodore Roosevelt came into office.
07:25And undeterred by the French failure, immediately set out to take up the colossal project.
07:34Roosevelt's mission was to make the United States a leading industrial superpower.
07:39And he'd do this by conquering the canal.
07:42For the president, it was the most important quest on the American continent.
07:47Before the canal, merchant ships travelling between the east and the west coast of the United States, say from New
07:54York to San Francisco,
07:56would have had to travel all the way around Cape Horn at the southernmost point of South America.
08:01And one of the most treacherous stretches of ocean on the planet.
08:05Creating the canal saved 8,000 miles of travelling and most crucially for the shipping companies, it saved money.
08:14Lots of money.
08:17For 10 million dollars, the Panamanian government gave the US permanent control over a strip of land across the country
08:26that would become known as the Panama Canal Zone.
08:32The plan was to build a canal at sea level by excavating an enormous 50-mile-long channel from Cologne
08:41on the Atlantic across to Panama City on the Pacific.
08:46And the man appointed to oversee all of this was the American engineer John Bindley Wallace.
08:52Wallace arrived in Panama in 1904, favouring the original French idea of a sea level passage to cut through the
09:02harsh terrain.
09:05The wilderness of Panama is an incredibly hostile environment, and the canal had to be built through a mountainous, dense
09:14jungle.
09:16I'm about to head a little way into that jungle to try and get just a small idea of what
09:22it must have been like trying to work in these conditions.
09:26I'm travelling along the Chagres River, a part of the canal system that winds its way into the jungle, and
09:35it's fraught with danger.
09:37The word Chagres, as in the Chagres River, means crocodile.
09:41So I'm very wary whenever we come into the shallows all around here, and I definitely won't be taking a
09:50dip.
09:58Panama's climate is generally hot and sticky.
10:01You get used to it in a way, but you step into the jungle, suddenly that heat and stickiness ramps
10:06right up.
10:07The air feels thick, and I'm very aware that there are things out here moving in all this overgrowth.
10:16It's a little disconcerting.
10:19Workers had to cut their way right through the jungle to build the canal, and they did so in debilitating
10:26heat and humidity,
10:27whilst avoiding deep swamps with crocodiles and deadly snakes.
10:32The venom from a coral snake would attack your nervous system, whilst a bite from a ten-foot-long mupana
10:40would cause internal bleeding and organ failure.
10:44But an even bigger threat was lurking here, one that couldn't be seen or avoided.
10:50The deadliest killer on Earth.
11:03The Panama Canal was built through one of the most hostile and dangerous environments imaginable.
11:10And during its construction, Chief Engineer John Wallace faced the same problems that the French had experienced just a few
11:16years earlier.
11:17Workers were falling seriously ill, but the cause of this deadly illness remained a mystery.
11:25During the second year of the canal's construction, sanitation experts reported 80% of the workforce had been hospitalised with
11:35malaria.
11:36And in the rainy season, an even deadlier disease reared its ugly head.
11:42A killer infection of the liver, called yellow fever.
11:47The number of deaths was so high, a train travelled to Cologne every night with carriages full of coffins.
11:56The completion of the canal would not be possible without knowing the source of these killer diseases.
12:05For years it was thought that yellow fever and malaria were caused by bad air from filth and decomposing matter.
12:14But one person proposed what was thought of at the time as a very obscure theory,
12:20that in fact they were transmitted by mosquitoes.
12:26That was Dr. William Gorgas, who in 1904 joined the canal project as Chief Sanitary Officer.
12:35As a survivor of yellow fever and with immunity, Gorgas made it his lifelong ambition to tackle this horrendous disease.
12:45He was one of the rare few that believed yellow fever and malaria were transmitted by mosquitoes, which at the
12:52time were very recent discoveries.
12:56It was Englishman Major Ronald Ross who first made the malaria connection in 1897 whilst dissecting a mosquito.
13:06And two years later, yellow fever and mosquitoes were linked for the first time.
13:13Using this research, Dr. Gorgas came up with a bold and daring plan to destroy every single mosquito within 500
13:24square miles.
13:27Gorgas hired 4,000 men to go throughout Panama and basically drain any blows of water.
13:36If they couldn't drain it, they covered it with oil to keep mosquitoes from breeding.
13:40Yellow fever patients were isolated and by doing all of these things within a year and four months, yellow fever
13:47was entirely eradicated from the isthmus of Panama.
13:50Malaria was nearly eliminated to the extent to which from that day to this, it's very rare to have any
13:57cases of malaria in Panama.
13:59And it's really only something you see in very remote parts of the jungle.
14:04Disease wasn't the only problem that plagued the canal in the early days of its construction.
14:11To create a 50-mile-long waterway across the isthmus, around 180 million cubic metres of soil needed to be
14:20dug out.
14:21But the labourers only had old tools that had been left over by the French a decade earlier.
14:28Chief Engineer John F. Wallace needed new machines that could handle the mammoth excavating work that lay ahead.
14:37Chief Engineer John F. Wallace brought in giant steam shovels, mechanical excavators that could shift eight tonnes of soil in
14:45one scoop.
14:46But there was a huge flaw in his plan.
14:49The new powerful machines were excavating more rock and soil than could be removed from site.
14:56And slowly the work began to drown in the spoil.
15:01With pressure mounting from Washington to get things moving quicker, Wallace was fighting a losing battle.
15:09At this rate, the canal would take decades to complete.
15:13In June 1905, exasperated and broken, Wallace gave up and resigned as Chief Engineer.
15:21All work came to a halt.
15:24It looked like the US effort was heading the same way as France.
15:33Until the arrival of a new Chief Engineer.
15:38John F. Stevens was a bit of a celebrity, known as the best engineer in America.
15:44As a railway man, he'd made his name building impossible routes across the USA.
15:50He immediately came up with a new plan.
15:53The key to getting the canal back on track would be an efficient railway that could move thousands of tonnes
15:59of rubble.
16:00When he was appointed, he came down to Panama and he saw that having a very good rail system was
16:06going to be vital to removing the incredible amount of rock and mud that was needed to dig out the
16:12Panama Canal.
16:13And so there were a lot of interesting innovations.
16:15One was kind of a boom crane called a track shifter that could lift whole sections of track and move
16:21it to a new place so it didn't have to be done by hand.
16:23And another thing that they did was they would use cranes to load the spoil onto rail cars.
16:30But these were open sided with a plow and so when they were to be offloaded, they would run the
16:35plow with the engine from the train and within ten minutes dump all the spoil from a rail car to
16:42wherever it needed to be.
16:44Massive engineering feat.
16:49With the railway up and running, the excavation work began to move along at pace.
16:54But now Stevens faced another menace referred to as the lion in the path, the Chagres River.
17:03Panama has a tropical rainforest climate with a dry season and a wet season.
17:09During the wet season, it can experience a staggering 105 inches of rainfall.
17:17As a comparison, the UK gets around 33 inches over a whole year.
17:23The rainy season in 1905 repeatedly caused the Chagres River to flood and the violent waters destroyed all building progress.
17:33Morale plummeted amongst the workforce as they were forced to work in soaking wet conditions.
17:40One worker recalled that sometimes you wouldn't see the sun for two weeks straight and in the morning you had
17:47to put your clothes on damp because there was no sun to dry them out.
17:54Stevens realised that attempting to build a sea level canal against the force of the flood prone Chagres would bring
18:02the work to a halt for around half the year.
18:05And something had to be done about it.
18:08He had a radical new plan up his sleeve and its success would rest entirely on the creation of one
18:16structure.
18:17The Gatun Dam.
18:26Stevens set out to build the largest dam ever created, with 14 gates to help control the flood flows of
18:34the Chagres River.
18:37The dam would also create an artificial body of water, the Gatun Lake, where more than a third of the
18:44ship's journey would take place.
18:46And at 26 metres above sea level, it greatly reduced the amount of excavation work needed.
18:54Higher than the Atlantic and Pacific water levels, Stevens had to think of a way of getting ships to climb
19:01up.
19:02He scrapped the idea of a sea level canal and instead devised an ingenious lock system that could lift ships
19:09up to the lake and then bring them back down again.
19:14The original locks in the Panama Canal are an engineering marvel to this day.
19:19The lock gates themselves are called miter gates, which is kind of a fancy way of talking about them.
19:26Miter referring to the join. In woodwork it would be the join.
19:29And that's because when the gates come together, they do interlock and form a watertight seal.
19:34But what's really especially cool about these is they are hollow inside.
19:39So they're built kind of like a ship's hull or like an airplane wing.
19:43And so that makes them very light. And so they can be open and closed with a very low horsepower
19:47motor.
19:48They're balanced very well.
19:52The canal's locks are powered by the Gatun dam.
19:55And over 53 million gallons of water is needed for each ship that travels through them.
20:03Stevens' plan required three sets of locks.
20:07One on the Atlantic side, the Gatun locks.
20:10And two on the Pacific side, the Pedro Miguel and Miraflores set of locks.
20:17This is the Miraflores set of locks on the Pacific side.
20:22There are two chambers, the upper and the lower.
20:25And in true Panama Canal style, when they were built, they were the largest lock chambers ever constructed.
20:35Each ship is led through the lock by a team of locomotives nicknamed mules.
20:42These are some of the workhorses of the canal.
20:50I've come up onto the front of one of the locomotives that helps guide these ridiculously enormous vessels through the
20:58locks.
20:59Engines like these have been in use ever since the canal opened.
21:04They run on this rack and pinion system.
21:07And you can see that middle rail with all its grooves in it.
21:12That provides traction for these geared wheels underneath the locomotives with the teeth that sit in to each one of
21:20those grooves and pull the locomotives along.
21:23This ship needs six mules to guide it safely through the lock.
21:28Ding, ding, ding, ding from the locomotives.
21:31That means we are underway. Here we go.
21:34The ship's propellers have just fired up.
21:38Oh, this is really exciting.
21:41The mule's job is to keep the ship on course so it doesn't bash into the chamber walls.
21:46And with just a few inches to spare on either side of the tanker, this is an incredibly precise operation.
21:54That is amazing. I can't believe they've come through here so smoothly.
21:59So just behind me here I heard a splash. There's another one.
22:02That's the cables from our locomotive being released from the vessel.
22:06And we bid farewell and bon voyage to the Atlantic bridge heading off into, well, into the Atlantic.
22:16But locomotives aren't the only means of guiding ships through the canal.
22:21Some of the bigger locks use tugboats and I'm about to get a ringside view of one of them.
22:27It's a dream come true.
22:31This is really exciting.
22:33I've known about the Panama Canal since I was about five years old.
22:36And I've always just had a kind of fascination with what goes on here.
22:43It's a bit of a moment for me, this.
22:48How important are the tugboats to the process of getting these huge ships through the locks?
22:53When ships are going into slow speeds, the pressure of the propeller into the rudder is not enough to control
23:01the direction of the ships.
23:02The ship will depend on two tugboats, one on the bow and one on the stern, to keep himself in
23:08the middle of the chamber.
23:10The whole process is very delicate. Every single moment of the luggage is critical.
23:16You can see there are other weather conditions that can involve, right?
23:20Like this heavy rain that we have right now, which reduces the visibility and makes the whole process more complicated.
23:26Absolutely.
23:26And challenging at the same time.
23:28Absolutely. That is not lost on me.
23:30This is a very tense period.
23:32Yeah. It takes a lot of training, simulation and years of experience as well.
23:41This huge gas tanker has come in from the Atlantic side.
23:45And after a 20-mile journey along the Gatun Lake, Edward and his tugboat team now face the daunting challenge
23:53of guiding it back down to the Pacific Ocean.
23:56And to do this, they need to attach tow lines.
24:00So now the tug is just approaching the vessel here at the bow of the ship.
24:05And when we get there, lines from our tugboat are going to be thrown up onto the bow of that
24:10ship.
24:11So we've got our chaps down here who are just waiting to release the lines and get them back up
24:16up there.
24:17Actually, that's quite far above me now.
24:28We're in the middle of a storm, in case you didn't realize.
24:32I think that guy just, the guy down there just said, welcome to Panama.
24:38Once the tow lines are in place, the tugboat can now guide the ship into the lock and wait for
24:45the water to go down to be level with the water in the next chamber.
24:50Since we came into this chamber, we've dropped about 16 feet, although it actually feels like it might be more.
24:56And these tugboats are working all the time.
24:59They're phenomenal machines.
25:01There are around 50 of them employed by the whole canal.
25:04And they're so versatile and so powerful.
25:08And in all weathers too.
25:11Experiencing first-hand how the canal works makes me appreciate how clever John F. Stephen's ideas were back in 1906.
25:21But there's one place I'm yet to see.
25:23It's where the most dangerous construction work took place.
25:27And it became known as Hell's Gate.
25:41The Panama Canal is one of the world's greatest engineering marvels.
25:46But its construction was plagued by disease, death and poor engineering planning.
25:54When Chief Engineer John F. Stephens came aboard in 1905, his new ambitious plan to build a lock system required
26:02a massive, unprecedented workforce.
26:06With the promise of riches, tens of thousands of labourers from all over the world came to Panama.
26:15I've come to the Panama Canal's official library to discover more about the people who made up this vast migrant
26:22workforce.
26:23So Orlando, what have we got here?
26:25We have here a database of the Panama Canal's own employment records from 1905 to 1937.
26:32So we have all the records of the people who have been working here.
26:35How important is it that we've got all these records?
26:38This is very important because it's not only an engineering project.
26:42It's a project that was made by people.
26:45So this is a way where you can link personal history with this engineering project.
26:49And we can access this now? We can have a look at some people who were employed?
26:53Yes, yes, of course we can.
26:55For example, last week we had the visit of this guy from Barbados.
27:01He knew from his father that his grandfather came for the building of Panama Canal.
27:07Elkanah Hurdle.
27:08So this chap, Elkanah, he was employed as a clerk?
27:11Yes, he was a clerk.
27:12Able to read and write.
27:14And he was paid $60 a month.
27:17And that was a very good money for those days.
27:20The workers who came to Panama were housed in purpose-built settlements.
27:24Accommodation, schools and recreation facilities were all specially constructed.
27:29But the quality of the amenities enjoyed by employees like Elkanah depended on where they came from.
27:37He arrived here in November 1908.
27:40Yes.
27:41And he was black.
27:42So there is an item on the form here, color.
27:45So this was segregation.
27:47This was racial segregation.
27:49Segregation.
27:50The United States had segregation laws that they exported to the Canal Zone.
27:56This was not something that we had in Panama before.
27:58So this, instead of going with white and colored, which was what the U.S. called it, they did two
28:05different payrolls.
28:06Silver roll and gold roll.
28:08White Americans were paid in American gold.
28:11And everybody else was paid in Panamanian silver.
28:14And this also reflected in education, access to food, facilities, housing.
28:19You would go to the commissariat, which is where people got their groceries and their shopping done.
28:25And there was an entrance for silver and an entrance for gold.
28:29So we can see here, Elkanah came from Barbados.
28:33Would that have been typical?
28:34Would many of workers have come from Barbados?
28:37Yes, around 40,000 people came from the West Indies.
28:41And most of them came from Barbados and Jamaica.
28:4440,000?
28:45That's a huge world.
28:48That's really quite powerful, isn't it?
28:50Because we've got a photo of Elkanah here.
28:52It turns that huge number, 40,000, into something much more personal.
28:58You know, this, here's our guy.
29:00A number became a person.
29:02So the chap who came to ask you about his grandfather,
29:06what was his reaction when you were able to pull this up in front of him?
29:10Well, he cried when he saw the images of his grandfather.
29:14He had never seen his picture before.
29:16It must have been a huge pride that he was able to take back to Barbados about his grandfather.
29:22Yes, it is. It is. And it's a pride for us also.
29:25To link histories and go beyond concrete or water.
29:30Records to link lives and memories.
29:36By 1907, excavation work on the Lock System Canal was running at full speed.
29:44Stevens, exhausted and feeling he could do no more,
29:47wrote a letter to Roosevelt, handing in his resignation.
29:52His successor, Colonel George Washington Gertels, a US Army officer and civil engineer,
29:59would take the canal to the finishing line.
30:02But the battle between man and nature was far from over.
30:07When he took over, Gertels prioritised what's now known as the Gaylard Cut.
30:13It's the narrowest and the deepest section of the excavation.
30:18And the job became a continuous 24-hour operation,
30:22with as many as 6,000 men working on site at any given time.
30:28This nine-mile-long stretch of land is where the most dangerous work took place.
30:35To remove 76 million cubic metres of soil, workers drilled holes in the mountains and then blasted dynamite inside.
30:44To create smaller rock pieces that could be carried away by steam shovels.
30:51Dynamiting, work mostly done by the West Indians, became the worst job of the whole construction project.
30:59Often in the heat, the dynamite would unexpectedly explode, maiming or killing anyone in the way.
31:10This enormous, man-made channel is an incredibly impressive sight to behold.
31:16But the conditions those men faced would have been horrendous.
31:20Not only did they have to contend with the heat and the humidity of the climate here,
31:25they would have been surrounded by a cacophony of noise,
31:29with constant drilling, steam shovels in operation, as well as frequent dynamite explosions.
31:36There was one sound, however, that no labourer wanted to hear.
31:41The sound of a whistle.
31:44It was a signal that a landslide had occurred, often burying workers alive.
31:51It was a massive problem that had plagued the area since the French excavation effort two decades earlier.
31:58The geology around the Panama Canal area is really unique.
32:01It's because we have this quite deep layer of clays overlaid by these volcanic rocks.
32:08And that provides this unfortunate situation where once the supportive structure is taken away from the clay,
32:15so, for example, digging a great big canal, those clays are really weakened.
32:20And where we have those heavy volcanic rocks on top, it creates quite a large overburden pressure,
32:26which places a weight on those clays, causing them to slide under gravity.
32:36Despite the extreme difficulties at the Gaylard Cut, by 1911, the canal was starting to take shape.
32:44And by 1913, these lock gates were tried and tested for the very first time.
32:50A 400-year-old dream finally became reality when, on the 10th of October 1913, water flowed through the canal
33:01for the first time.
33:02The world suddenly became smaller, with a ceremonial event that was an impressive technical feat in itself.
33:13There was a temporary dam that had been constructed that had to be destroyed in order to release the water.
33:19And in a kind of a very early, dramatic public ceremony that would do Hollywood proud, I think, today,
33:27the dam was actually exploded by the president at the time, President Woodrow Wilson, sitting in his office in Washington,
33:34D.C.
33:34It was done by telegraph. He pushed a key, sent an electric signal down to Panama, which detonated the charge
33:41and blew up the dam.
33:43I can't imagine what the flood of water must have been like.
33:47To have this uncontrolled rush of water out must have been an incredible sight.
33:51The canal took over a decade to finish.
33:55It came in at 444% over budget.
33:59But the greatest cost was that of human life.
34:04Between the French and the American efforts, it's estimated that around 25,000 people lost their lives building the Panama
34:12Canal.
34:13The Panama Canal opened on the 15th of August, 1914.
34:18And the first vessel to officially transit across Panama was an American cargo and passenger ship called the SS Ancon.
34:27From that day, the canal has never looked back.
34:31It's grown from strength to strength.
34:34But so have the ships.
34:36And after 90 years of operation, a drastic change was needed.
34:51In 1914, after decades of toil, the Panama Canal finally opened.
34:58And over a century later, John F. Stephen's great engineering marvel has stood the test of time.
35:07Even with today's technology, navigating the canal system is no easy feat.
35:13Not even for the most experienced ship captains and crew.
35:18But help is at hand.
35:20Before beginning its journey, the captain hands over control of their ship to a canal pilot that guides them through
35:27the eight hour or so transit.
35:31It's a job that requires expert knowledge and years of training.
35:35And this is where it all happens.
35:40Good morning.
35:41Good morning, Rob. Welcome to our training center.
35:44Thank you very much, Captain. Lovely to meet you.
35:46What happens with these ships that are around us?
35:48These are actual 1 to 25 scale of real ships that are out there in the world.
35:55These models feel so real to the pilots that they feel they're on the real ship.
36:01All those hydrodynamic forces that you would find in the real world, they're right here.
36:06Is there any chance we can get into one of the model vessels you've got here?
36:08Of course. Why don't we take the tanker today?
36:11Let's go on board. I'm excited to see this.
36:13All hands on board. Let's go.
36:16Every key feature of the canal is to scale in this 35-acre training facility, including the Gatun Lake, the
36:24Gaylard Cut, and even the locks.
36:27And I can't wait to get stuck in, in my tanker.
36:30We're going to simulate going in from the Caribbean to the Pacific Ocean.
36:35We don't have tugboats here right now.
36:38So we're going to simulate using the thrusters as tugboats.
36:42Gotcha.
36:45The locker head looks scarily narrow.
36:48And my first challenge is to try to get my tanker into it, and not hit the sides.
36:55Are you sure we're going to fit through there?
36:57I assure you it will fit, Rob.
36:58Yes.
36:59What we're going to do now, we're going to line ourselves up that direction, and we're going to start going
37:03inside.
37:04Let's use the bow thruster simulating its tugboat on the bow.
37:07Okay.
37:07So move this lever here to number three.
37:10Number three? Yes.
37:11Okay.
37:11Let's give that a crank.
37:13We're moving the pointy end about to the left.
37:18Very gentle. Just nice and easy.
37:22And we're proceeding inside.
37:25Amazing.
37:25Good job.
37:26So with all the different maneuvers that are required to passage through the canal, what are the trickiest bits out
37:32there?
37:32Some colleagues might say the timing.
37:35Let's say there's about 40 ships every day transiting through the canal.
37:40If, for some reason, every ship lost 10 minutes, eventually you'd have, at the end of the day, 400 minutes.
37:47The pilot has to be highly skilled to not only manage ship handling, but also timing.
37:55So it's not just the precision of positioning the ship, it's the precision of timing, because any delays is costing
38:02a lot of money.
38:03You got it right on.
38:05We have to run the Panama Canal like a Swiss watch.
38:09There is a lot of responsibility you have as the pilot through Panama Canal.
38:14We're an elite group of 300 pilots, highly skilled, highly trained.
38:21In 1999, the canal reached a significant milestone when the United States handed the strategic waterway over to Panama.
38:32For the first time in its existence, the global gateway was in Panamanian hands, ending nearly a century of American
38:40control.
38:41I believe many people internationally didn't think we'd be able to manage it after it was transferred back to Panama.
38:47And for such a small country to contribute so much to world trade, it's a source of joy to be
38:52able to contribute to the world in that way.
38:54And I think we have a beautiful motto.
38:57It's not official, but we always say, we're the bridge of the world and the heart of the universe.
39:04With the keys to the kingdom, Panama soon realized they'd inherited a big problem.
39:10There was a limit to the size of ship which could squeeze through the canal.
39:15I'm three stories up here at the control tower at the locks.
39:21But the ship's bridge is still above me.
39:24Hola!
39:25In the last 50 years, the carrying capacity of container ships has increased 1,500%.
39:33As the ships were getting bigger, the Panama Canal wasn't.
39:38And they needed to react or face losing millions in toll revenue.
39:49In 2009, an ambitious $5 billion expansion project began.
39:56It involved building two new sets of locks.
39:59Coccoli on the Pacific side and Agua Clara on the Atlantic.
40:04And excavating a bigger and deeper second lane of traffic to double the canal's capacity.
40:12It was a huge undertaking and, like a hundred years ago, also ran the risk of failures.
40:22It's a very commanding position we have up here, looking out across both sets of locks.
40:28What was it that triggered the construction of this new set of locks?
40:33The canal was going to be transferred from the US to Panama in 1999.
40:37And at the time, we were pretty maxed out in the original locks.
40:40And we were going to lose relevance if we didn't expand the canal.
40:44The biggest container vessel that can go through the original locks can carry 5,400 containers.
40:49Okay.
40:49The biggest one here has brought 16,000 containers.
40:53So it was about...
40:54That's almost three times the price.
40:56Those kinds of figures are mind-blowing.
40:58About 97% of the world's lead can now fit through these locks,
41:03which was not the case before we built the expanded canal.
41:06Were there physical challenges of building this extension so close to the original?
41:11Even though it's so close, it's far enough that there was no impact to shipping.
41:14And to us, that was very, very key and critical.
41:17What's the main differences between Coccoli, the new extension of the Panama Canal, and the original locks?
41:23We have rolling gates.
41:25The reason we have rolling gates is because the miter gates, which is what you have in the original locks,
41:31they open like that, right?
41:33First, there was no miter gates of that size in the world, so we didn't want to try something that
41:38was not out there.
41:39And also, those gates, you need to bring a floating crane, remove them, and take them to a shipyard for
41:44maintenance.
41:45These ones, you put them in the recess, you put stop locks in front of it, and it becomes a
41:50dry chamber, so you do the maintenance on site.
41:52Very clever.
41:52We cannot afford to close this lock because there's only one lane.
41:56I love that.
41:57So there's design in there, there's design for maintenance, it's engineering design for maintenance.
42:01Yes.
42:03Without sufficient water, the canal wouldn't be able to function effectively.
42:07But with climate change, and Panama's rainfall average slowly decreasing, the need to save water is more critical now than
42:16it was in John F. Stevens' day.
42:20So, as part of the expansion, water-saving basins were built next to the locks.
42:25Each basin with the surface area of 25 Olympic swimming pools.
42:32It's very important for us to protect the water, because 55% of the population of Panama drinks water from
42:39Gatun and Alajuela Lake.
42:40So we really need to be cautious with water, so it was mainly for that.
42:44How do you manage that?
42:45So when this vessel comes in, part of the water that we need to release to bring him down to
42:52here, will go into those three water-saving basins, which have different elevations.
42:57Three-fifths of the water is saved, and two-fifths are released to the next chamber.
43:01So instead of just flushing that water through from chamber, down to chamber, down to chamber, as it happens at
43:07Miraflores.
43:08And that saves how much water?
43:1060% of the amount of water that a traditional lockage would use.
43:14That's huge.
43:17For over a century, the Panama Canal has provided a shortcut between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that we all
43:26rely on every single day.
43:30No matter how you live your life, there's a very good chance that one way or another, you are dependent
43:36on goods that pass through the Panama Canal.
43:40Whether that's the food you eat, the car you drive, or the materials used to build and furnish your house.
43:46And it's cargo vessels like this that make that a reality.
43:53I can't help but be in awe of the engineers who came up with the solutions to tame this unforgiving
44:00tropical wilderness.
44:02Nor the thousands of workers who battled their way through it, many making the ultimate sacrifice.
44:09The construction of the Panama Canal yielded a series of world-firsts, world's biggest, and in my opinion, the world's
44:16most audacious.
44:18The Panama Canal is undoubtedly an engineering masterpiece to behold.
44:27And Rob's back with Brand New Building the Impossible next Friday at 8.
44:31Brand new tomorrow at 9.15, did you know that Queen Victoria was quite capable of causing a scandal that
44:37nearly brought down the Empire when she became very close to groomsman John Brown?
44:41Next tonight, it's like something out of an Indiana Jones adventure with Dara O'Brien in the title role as
44:47Relic Hunter in Mysteries of the Pyramids.
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