Building The Panama Canal

America has built and owned many amazing things, but the Panama Canal is one of the greatest things we have built. The idea of having a canal in Panama dated back to the 1500’s when the king of Spain wanted to have a canal built. After it was proved to be impossible to build at the time, the king gave up on the idea. France was really the first to attempt building a canal in 1880. The process was led by Count Ferdinand de Lesseps. The workers started to get illnesses such as yellow fever and malaria. Count Ferdinand de Lesseps realized that building the canal was too difficult and gave up on the task. After the long discussion of the US Isthmian Canal Commission and President Theodore Roosevelt, The French assets were purchased by the United States in 1902
Dr. William Gorgas was Chief Sanitary Officer. He said that mosquitos carried deadly diseases. Gorgas had a mission to get rid of any carriers by fumigating and cleansing homes, food, and water. The official opening of the Panama Canal was on August 15 1914. The cost of building the canal was more than three hundred fifty million dollars. 3.4 million cubic meters of concrete went into building the locks for the canal, and two hundred forty million cubic yards of dirt and rock were removed. It took more than fifty six thousand people to build the canal, more than five thousand six hundred people died due to illness or injury, the length of the Panama Canal is about forty miles long. By using the canal it saves us about eight thousand miles. In 1964 a disruption between United States residents and Panamanians got heated over the right to fly the flag of Panama in the zone of the canal. Panama and the US were very upset with each other. On September 7 of 1977, president at the time Jimmy Carter signed the Panama Canal Treaty and the Neutrality Treaty which gave control of the canal to Panama by the year