Theodore Roosevelt's Project Of Building The Panama Canal

In 1899 President Theodore Roosevelt started a project of building the Panama Canal. It is the 50 mile long water passage that connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. This passage is very useful because ships can travel through it and they don’t have to go all the way around the continent. This is the main purpose for this canal, to shorten the passage that ships have to travel. This saved a lot of money on fuel that ships had to use to go around the continent. People thought about building this canal in 1500s. The idea to build such a long canal was impossible at the time but it stuck around. Many years later people advanced a lot and now we had enough knowledge to build such an immense passage. The French people originally begun building it. When they started, there were a lot of diseases that caused a lot of people dying. They failed to finish building the canal but they made a first step towards it. …show more content…
Now the Americans were experiencing what French had experienced. They also had problems with illnesses such as malaria and yellow fever. A lot of people were dying because of the many accidents that happened during the construction. People didn’t use good enough rules of safety to protect themselves. There were a lot of safety hazards on the construction area. In 1905 a person named John Stevens took over the construction area as a chief engineer. He immediately improved the workflow by hiring west Indian laborers and more. He started using things like swinging boom to lift pieced of the railroad to bring the rocks that were mined out. He also saw the danger of landslide and convinced the President Roosevelt to lock the