Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 289, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 December 1910 — HAPPENINGS IN THE CITIES [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

HAPPENINGS IN THE CITIES

Forging the Big Panama Canal Gates

my s mines of accidental explosion might easily destroy them, the government has begun to build the gates. The cost will be $5,506,000, Of the 60,000 tons of steel required, the heaviest single pieces will weigh about eighteen tons. The thousands of individual pieces, numbered and fitted to go together as easily as children’s blocks, will be shipped by steamer via Baltimore and with them will go more than four hundred skilled structural steel builders from Pittsburg to set them. The advance guard of experts will leave here In December and the first work probably will begin early in 1911. The location of the 46 pairs of gates will be, 20 at the Gatun dam on the Pacific side, 12 at Pedro Miguel, and 14 at Miraflores, near, the Atlantic entrance. The gates are designed to hold back water 47.4 feet deep in a channel 110 feet wide, which means a pressure of- a million pounds.' The weight of a single gate will be about 600 tons, and the dimensions are 77 to 82 feet high, 60 to 75 feet wide and 7 feet thick. Each lock will be ample for a ship 50 per cent larger than any vessel afloat and it has been estimated that as many as a hundred ocean ships may be handled in a single day. There are no locks approaching these in size. The ramous Sues canal is a sea level affair aftdjthe few* great lock canals would have td-■com-bine their gates to equal the size and strength of the great doors of Panama.

piTTSBURG, PA.—Mischievous boys dreaming of gates to be carried away and future Hallowe’en trophies would not in the wildest nightmares *®aglne such enormous gates as are *>®lng made In Pittsburg for the PahaIna canal. T^ ey will be the largest gates in the ’World. Any one of the 92 of them will be about as high as a six-story building, as wide as many city buildings are (65 feet), and seven feet deep or thick. The structural steel that wiU go to *nake them will weigh 66,000 tons, or more than eight times as much as ,was used to build the Eiffel tower in The mighty-portals, designed to admit a world’s commerce from one ocean to another, must withstand a tide of critlcisnLas well as a tremendous pressure ot water and possible convulsions of earth. For years the controversy over gates or no gates, locks or sea level, has been the dividing issue of the canal problem. In the face of fear in some quarters that the foundations on the isthmus are not sure enough for locks, that earthquakes or water pressure would dislodge them, and that an ene-