History Highlights - Landslides!

The Cucaracha Slide had first bedeviled the builders of the Panama Canal in 1907. It appeared along the Gaillard (Culebra) Cut that carried the canal through the mountains and over the Continental Divide. A huge break in January 1913 pushed back the canal’s opening to August 1914. Slides continued and dredging struggled to keep pace. A fast-growing island appeared in the canal, eventually forcing its closure on September 18, 1915.

With two new active slides near the quiet, but still threatening, Cucaracha Slide, skeptics began openly predicting that the engineers’ plans to out-dredge the slides would be futile. At President Woodrow Wilson’s request, the National Academy of Sciences appointed a team of nine experts led by Charles R. Van Hise, a geologist and president of the University of Wisconsin, to investigate.

Check out the latest release in the TRB History Highlights series.

As part of the Centennial Celebration, TRB has initiated the History Highlights series that will regularly release stories that highlight the events and people that helped shape TRB during the last 100 years.