Word: canallers
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Seventy-three years after it opened to link the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the Panama Canal remains one of the engineering marvels of the world. At one end of the 50-mile-long waterway, the 12,000 ships that traverse it annually are lifted 85 ft. above sea level by a series of locks, enabling them to sail through the mountainous spine of the Panama Isthmus. When they reach the opposite coast, another set of locks floats them gently back down to the ocean...
...operation of these aquatic elevators consumes a prodigious amount of fresh water. Each time a ship passes through the canal, some 52 million gallons must be pumped into the locks and then, after the ship has passed, flushed out to sea. "The locks are like giant water closets," explains an official of the Panama Canal Commission. "Once you pull the chain, you never see the water again...
...remainder is tapped from nearby Madden Lake, formed in 1935 (also by damming) to provide an additional reservoir of water for the dry season. But now a 375-page report by Stanley Heckadon Moreno, an environmentalist at Panama's Ministry of Planning, has raised a startling worry about the canal's future: it may be running short of water...
...problem is that the dense tropical rain forest that blanketed the 1,300-sq.-mi. watershed around the route of the canal has been disappearing at an alarming pace, cut away by farmers. By 1950 some 20% of the forest had been cut. Now more than 70% has vanished, and about 800 acres of the remainder is being cleared every year...
Ever since 1914, when U.S. engineers connected the Atlantic and Pacific oceans by carving a 43-mile-long canal across the Isthmus of Panama, the two ! countries have been intimately linked. So great is American influence that the U.S. dollar is legal currency in Panama. Yet Panamanians are extremely sensitive to any slight from their northern neighbors, especially since their nation is due to take over full jurisdiction of the canal at the end of 1999. Thus diplomats scurried for cover last June, when Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, an opponent of the controversial 1977 treaty that turned over...