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Centuries
of Civil Engineering
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Nichols,
A.B., Office Engineer, Culebra, Canal Zone, Panama
Panama Canal Notebooks.
Manuscripts, typescripts, maps, blueprints,
and printed materials, circa 1906-1920.
94 volumes
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In July 1906, A.B. Nichols was appointed Office Engineer at
Culebra, a
position he held until he left Panama in 1914. At Culebra he would have
seen the mountain range, nine miles wide and 550 feet high, that proved
the most difficult challenge of the canal construction. The design for the
channel to be cut through the mountains specified a width of 670 feet at
the top. But the sides kept breaking loose and sliding into the trench,
and the width at top eventually was almost three times as large. Although
the huge American steam shovels could remove five times the amount of
material than the machines used by the French could move at the start of
the project, only dynamite could break the layers of rock that had to be
blasted away. On December 12, 1908, twenty-three workers died when 44,000
pounds of dynamite exploded prematurely. It was the worst accident of the
canal project, and happened at Bas Obispo in the Culebra Cut. One of
Nicols's notebooks contains reports on the blast by the Superintendent of
Construction and by the Electrical Engineer . These photographs show how
one of the gigantic steam shovels was thrown completely across the cut and
crushed.
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