Canal Not Ready For Ships Till Jan. 1

New York Times 100 years ago today, August 17, 1913:
Filling of Great Waterway Will Require Several Months, Say Returned Panama Workers.
MUCH WORK YET IN CUT
Surface of Gatun Lake Must Be Raised 45 Feet — Rainfall Decrease This Year.
    The Ancon of the Panama Line, which arrived here yesterday from Cristobal, brought up a large number of Panama Canal workers who are taking their vacations. One and all they scouted the idea that the whaler Fram, which sailed from Buenos Aires on Friday for Colon to "go through the canal" would be able to make the trip through the waterway in a short time.
    The turning of the water into Culebra Cut in October does not mean, say the Government employes, that it will be passible to float a ship through any time soon after that event, and the blowing up of the Gamboa dike will only mean that the water from Gatun Lake will be allowed to-run into the cut slowly. Culebra Cut is nine miles long, and it will take some time to fill it with water at the rate at which it will be permitted to run in.
    "If all the work were completed by September, or even October," said one of the canal employes, "no ships could use the canal, because there would not be enough water in it to float a ship before the first of the year.
    "That the canal will be ready to use in October is predicted on figures quoted from the last March report of Col. Goethals to the Secretary of War. But the locks cannot be made ready before the end of September. Trebling the force in Culebra Cut would not mean that the output could even be doubled, and the excavation there cannot possibly be completed to the stage where a ship could pass before November.
    "It will take a lot of water to raise the surface of Gatun Lake one foot. That water is coming down in Panama every day, the rainy season is on, and the earth baked dry by four months of the dry season has already drunk its fill of water. The streams are swelling and the Chagres River is pouring millions of gallons of water into the lake every day. But Gatun Lake, now 45 feet above sea level, will have an area of 164 square miles when the water is at 85 feet above sea level, and it will contain 183,000,000,000 cubic feet of water. The lake may be full by Nov. 15, but surely not before that date."
    The canal workers report, too, that the rainfall this season is not up to expectations and that the dry season wind blowing through Culebra Cut has been worse this year than ever before, probably because the canal was deeper. These winds this year set in about Jan. 1 and lasted until June, blowing directly across the Isthmus. They cause the change in seasons, for when they blow the accumulation of moisture over the Isthmus is prevented, and when they cease blowing the clouds collect. This year they swept the canal belt clear of clouds for full six months, and in the interior of Panama caused such a drought that most of the streams were dry, and hundreds of cattle died from thirst.
    When the winds veer away from the Isthmus the rains begin again, and then there is a season of seven or eight months in which no day passes without a shower of more or less duration and intensity. It is the common impression in the United States that the dry season is the more livable of the two, but those who live there do not find it so, because the constant wind, with its accompanying clouds of dust, has a very nerve-wearing effect, much like that of a long, hard Winter in the North.
    The men who are digging Culebra cut also prefer the rainy season. For days at a time they do not know what it is to be dry, for they work right through showers that are blinding heavy, two inches an hour not being uncommon. But this is not so steady and trying an adversary as the constant winds and dust. Some days a gale of twenty-eight miles an hour blows across the isthmus, and commonly the dry season wind reaches a velocity of twenty miles. It blows in the general direction in which the canal runs, from north to south, and when it reaches the hills or the continental divide is gathered as though in a funnel into the open narrow trench known as Culebra Cut, it fairly whistles through this narrow gorge, carrying with it a cloud or dust.