The Flood of the Two Oceans (Gamboa, Panama – October 10, 1913) — Imagine History

The heavy, equatorial humidity of the Panamanian Isthmus hangs over the Culebra Cut like a wet wool blanket. For nine grueling years, this canyon has echoed with the relentless, ear-splitting clatter of Marion steam shovels, the sharp crack of pneumatic drills pounding into solid basalt, and the screech of dirt trains hauling millions of tons of red earth day in and day out. But today, at two o'clock in the afternoon, an uncanny stillness settles over the great ditch. Thousands of West Indian laborers, French contractors, and American engineers line the terraced red-clay cliffs, their sweat-drenched khaki shirts and pith helmets stark against the dark volcanic stone.

All eyes are fixed on the Gamboa Dike—a massive earthen wall nearly thirty feet high that has kept the rising waters of Gatun Lake out of the dry, carved trench of the cut. Somewhere four thousand miles to the north, in the White House in Washington, D.C., President Woodrow Wilson is pressing a gold telegraph key. The electrical pulse surges down coastal telegraph lines, jumps under the Caribbean Sea through submarine cables, and races along the rail tracks of the Isthmus straight to a battery of dynamos waiting at the dike’s edge.

Suddenly, the ground beneath your boots quivers with a deep, visceral shudder. A series of thunderous concussions tears through the silence as eighteen tons of dynamite detonate simultaneously along the embankment. An immense plume of gray mud, pulverized rock, and geysers of white water erupts hundreds of feet into the air, blotched with sulfurous smoke. Before the sound of the blast finishes echoing off the canyon walls, a roaring wall of brown, churning water rushes through the shattered dike, tumbling forward into the dry abyss of the Culebra Cut to wed the waters of the Atlantic with the path to the Pacific.

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On October 10, 1913, the demolition of the Gamboa Dike marked the final major earthwork barrier in the construction of the Panama Canal. Engineered primarily by the United States Army Corps of Engineers under Colonel George Washington Goethals, the project required the excavation of over 200 million cubic yards of earth and cost the lives of tens of thousands of workers across decades of effort, largely due to tropical diseases like yellow fever and malaria as well as dangerous dynamite accidents. The blast at Gamboa allowed Gatun Lake to flood the Culebra Cut, effectively joining the Atlantic and Pacific watersheds and paving the way for the canal's official commercial opening in August 1914.