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Show Wholly New Theory of So-called Slides Is Presented as Result of Many Years of Experience With Similar Troubles in Mines Gas Follows Earth Fault, Which Must Be Traced Until Reservoirs Can Be Tapped and Pressure Removed Hopes Government's Theory Is Correct and That Present Work Will Permanently Open the Canal, but Will Not Be Surprised If Trouble Is Again Encountered. Former Senator Thomas Kearns of Utah recently visited the Panama canal in company with his engineer, engi-neer, by invitation of a high government official. On his return, he was requested unofficially to put into writing his conclusions as to the cause of the so-called slides at the canal. His statement of the situation is given herewith: ONE of the important questions, if not the most important, in the minds of the American people today, to-day, is "Will the great waterway, water-way, the Isthmian canal, prove a success suc-cess of is it a failure!" It means everything to us, not only from a commercial com-mercial standpoint .but from a protective protec-tive standpoint, for it makes it possible possi-ble for Uncle Sam's great fleet to pass from the waters of the Atlantic into tlit Pacific, upon a few hours' notice, and so saves the expense of maintaining two great fleets instead of one. On account of the unfortunate present pres-ent conditions in Europe and the insistent in-sistent demand of the majority of Americans for "Preparedness," many of our people are asking: "Are we go-iug go-iug to he able to keep the great Isthmian Isth-mian canal open or will it continue to fill up?" There are grave reasons for asking this question, for, since it was first opened to navigation ou August 4, '11)14, it has been closed and out of commission virtually two-thirds of the time. Should We Abandon the Canal? Many great minds are asking the rjuestion: "If this canal condition continues, con-tinues, should we abandon it altogether and construct a sea-lcvel canal at Nicaragua? Nic-aragua? '" To iny mind thia would not help the- situation. If similar conditions condi-tions are encountered in' Nicaragua at sea-level, we should have there a harder hard-er problem to solve than the present Panama lock canal. There would not be the same opportunity to remove the cause. In uiy opinion, the problem can be solved; the canal will be a success and the movements of the earth that are at present filling up the Culebra cut can be overcome. After close personal investigation and careful study, iu company with my engineer, en-gineer, who has been in my employ for tweuty-six years and who has solved many similar problems, though smaller, of course, I am fully convinced that - Subterranean gases coming from .below are causing the trouble not soft material ma-terial underlying the hillsides, nor the weight of the banks, as is maintained bv most of the eminent engineers and critics who have ventured to give their opinion. Recently Governor George "W. Goeth-als Goeth-als of the Panama canal zone was quot ed as saying that work had begun on the removal of from six to eight million cubic yards of rock aud earli from the banks of the great Culebra cut! This work is now well under way aud close to oue million cubic yards per month are being removed. At this rate the work should be completed some time in the fall? The purpose of the removal of this immense amount of material from the banks of the great cut is to cause a definite and complete cessation of the annoying, so-called slides that have so interfered with the operation of the canal as to cause a growing doubt in the minds of the American people of the real efficiency of the canal which has cost the government, up to i he present day, close to five hundred million dollars. This method of working work-ing for the solution of the so-called i slide problem there has the approval of i;ertr!y every engineer who has studied j 'lie matter, and the American people ; ' vt'jitly hope that the engineers are' n1' 'T'-1. i Removal of Earth X ill Not Help. .V. the risk of the disapproval of .:::::iy eminent engineers who are fa-miliar fa-miliar with the conditions, I disagree with those who believe that, when the eight million cubic yards of material ntenti'ine.; are removed from the banks, nr.d the weight T;;keu off, the questiou is so!vc-i. it will make but little, if any, (iiierencc in the filling of the C'u-lei.'ra C'u-lei.'ra cut from the bottom, and I ven ture the prediction now, that after tho banks are so lowered and the amount of dirt above mentioned has been removed re-moved and the dredges have finished their work and have been taken from the cut, there will be a repetition of the filling from the bottom and sides within with-in ninety days. Islands of mud and eruptive rock will again begin to appear ap-pear above the surface of the water .just as they appeared when they so effectively ef-fectively closed the canal some months ago. Let us supposo for a minute that I am correct in this prediction. What is then to be done? Must the canal, which involved so ;mueh labor and expense, ex-pense, and which means iSo much, not only to the American people, but to the convenience of the world, be abandoned aban-doned as useless? Surely it would seem that the greatest engineers that America has produced would have exhausted ex-hausted their talints in their efforts to stop the so-called slides that they will have failed iu their theory. In my humble judgment, the situation would not be so serious as one might fear. It is a fact that the army engineers have accepted the theory of the earth 's "sliding by its own weight" into the canal and are proceeding in accordance with thist theory, and, until such time as the 8,000,000 cubic yards have beeu removed and the banks cut down to where the weight has been taken off, it would be useless to suggest any other oth-er remedy. Those estimates were made about February 1 of this year and the work should be well toward completion com-pletion by October 1. I sincerely hope that the engineers are correct in this theory and that the problem will be solved so that the canal may remain open after that date. Trouble Is Confined to Limited Area. Of course, this proviso was made with that certain condition that it would solve the preseut difficulty, but, if the two highest points within the area of movements, known as' Gold Hill and Contractor's hill (which were one and the same hill before the chanuel was cut through), should develop a movement move-ment into the caual, it would add to the difficulty. There would then be many additional million cubic yards to be moved. However, in my judgment, from observation and the nature of the The lines at the sides indicate the now until the "angle of repose" is r rock in those particular hills, they will not experience any such trouble from those points. The movements are all within a space of about 2-jOII feet, or about half a mile, and my firm belief is that the trouble is all caused by subterranean sub-terranean gases formed in the earth, which, when permitted to escape through certain channels or breaks in - r v- " xx: -" IV- " - b.v!,w.A;-,;.v: ..I:;.!-, VV Sir TGKXtZR. WK, V , ' r r " ",-, ' ( Tnrr jxrexmz vitrfr or gaizljuvi ccrr.zoosrjrol- y r I f TZZr: O JV- ' " h- Vl"Li imtrMjk : mm ., ".y; .-: , Bill -It poL r''--'fi "7 .-v- - . l " 4 f mX 'P's&Pf J- TO . ' " ' ?wTor eozb JzziLjmowijre iwrms: --rr rz , - zeemve jmw.imicAnve the earth, carry with them eruptive material, ma-terial, sometimes for a long distance, to the place of the least resistance. My conclusion is based on somewhat peculiar pe-culiar personal experiences with similar earth movements encountered in mining operations, and my opinion is not formed all from theory. It is based mostly on practice and experience. Are there gases confined in subterranean channels that have burst through the earth's crust at the Culebra cut and produced earth waves ' which have caused such havoc at that point in the canal? In my judgment, it is pos- eible to. trace this zone of disturbance and then to tap the gas chamber beneath be-neath the rocky rim and so relieve the pressure at that point. i Where the Engineers May Be Mistaken. As far as my investigation has gone and from all knowledge I can gather, neither the French government nor our own . government thought it worth while to determine the character of the rock and subsoil through which the canal ca-nal was constructed. . A little more than 400 years ago, R 1 T Arrows show upward pressure of gases carrying mud amd rocks from below through fault or dyke cross- i IMS CNAL slopes of the cut which is being made eachod. I Balboa climbed the mountain range at the Isthmus of Panama and beheld the ! great Pacific ocean. Almost immediately immedi-ately the idea of constructing a waterway water-way across the Isthmus of Panama was conceived. Since that tiino every generation gen-eration has looked into the feasibility of a canal at Panama, but from Balboa to Cue thai s, no one ever made a com prehensive test of the formations below be-low the surface, either by boring or shaft sinking, which should have been made at least 500 feet beneath the water wa-ter level, that they might know what foundation the canal bed would rest upon. When a business block, a rail-roud rail-roud or a groat bridge is to be constructed, con-structed, the first thing that the owner or contractor does is to learn all about the ground on which it is fo stand. Tho .contractor, as well as the owner, desires de-sires to know tho character of the soil or rock, that he may determine the coft of excavation, and he also must know that he has a firm foundation on which his building or bridge is to rest. Yet, building contractors in New York and other cities spend more money in determining the nature of tho ground beneath a prospect i vo skyscraper than did the government of the United States in determining the character of the soil or rock beneath the channel of the Panama canal. Tf corporations or private individuals prosecuted their work in this manner there would be more failures than there now are. Personally, Per-sonally, I think that the first million dollars should have been spent on a thorough test of the formation, at least to a dopth of 500 feet below the channel, chan-nel, the same to mark tho first page of the great undertaking, and I firmly believe that a similar test, in a lessor degree, say to a depth of 500 feet, will yet have to be made in and across that particular section of the Culebra cut. That is, of course, providing the present pres-ent theory of the engineers fails and tho removal of the weight flrom the banks fails to remedy conditions at the canal. Time and the expense now being be-ing incurred should prove to the public pub-lic that subterranean pressures and gases are, to a largo degree, causing tho trouble. This should be determined deter-mined within a short space of time, say the first of the coming year. Fault Plane Cuts Across Canal. To a practical geologist, a great break in tho formation at the place of the greatest disturbance is visible, crossing the canal itself almost at right angles. This break should be carefully tested and followed and absolutely located lo-cated at its source, which may be some five or six miles away, and there relieved re-lieved of its constantly accumulating gas pressure, which is now forcing its way and carrying with it great quantities quanti-ties of eruptive material to the placo of least resistance namely, into the bottom of the cnnal at the Culebra cut. A trained, experienced and practical mining engineer, who lias encountered such difficulties on a smaller scale. vat. "Vv'V- : .v ""4 vxx S KiV J '.'T "X- ; av -X-. v?;X X iM wit, xx ' -.x.. !B at ; - - 1 xvr.s- - t tr m NSj X r, , ' X- , XS " ' ' " 'X" l braxfi M' X-0RXi'lM r 5 g-,Jf X "toV ' XV,, l X; ' V:- jr G4UZAKD cvt, czrzrEXA.jiforjzzx: TKoasLrjapTZ jzjuvD.tfr xkxzozj OfJTAX, , OCCASZOJOIZZJT T-JV TO TJSZJ -JTST should bo able to follow the rocky signs I BO potent with meaning to tho trained eye, which would enablo him to follow tho course of this fault plane with certainty. cer-tainty. Drilling along the course of thia fault, I believe, would establish the fact that this break in the earth's crust is filled with porphyry, eruptive material and soft clay, similar to that found in other sections of the country where eruptions of this kind are not uncommon. Drilling, I believe, also would determine whether or not there was gas along the faull. Gas Escapes at Weakest Point. Let us admit for the moment that my judgment is correct. It is not unreasonable unreason-able to suppose that, if gas was confined con-fined in subterranean caverns or old and-, extinct craters, it would seek to escape at a point where the resistance was tho least. Tf the channel was open and the material soft, it would not . cause a tremendous upheaval if it could escape along the crack in the earth's crust, loosely filled with clay and ernp-tivo ernp-tivo rock. The presence of this crack or break indicates a previous eruption of confined gases. Now tho great Culebra Cu-lebra cut, made in digging the canal, must have further reduced the resistance resis-tance offered to the (gas struggling to escape, so that it would seem not altogether al-together unreasonable to inquire whether wheth-er or not the so-called slides at this point were not in reality caused by earth waves, sympathetic seismic disturbances, dis-turbances, due wholly to tho presence of the gas beneath the bottom of the canal at this point. When those movements move-ments came, the banks of the canal shook a great deal of stone and earth, it is true, slid into the canal, but the greater part of tho trouble was due to the earth in the bottom of the canal rising up to the surface of the water and filling the canal and forming inlands amidst re-am. Tho theory of the canal engineers is that beneath the rock through which the canal is cut, there is a substratum of nuul and soft earth. The weight of tho ' rock and earth on either side of the canal, ca-nal, resting on this soft layer of roud, causes it to ooze into the canal, and thus produces the greater part of the trouble. Their remedy for this is to reduce re-duce the weight on top of the mud, that is, cut down the banks on either side to almost water level for some distance dis-tance back, until an "angle of repose" is reached. It is with this hope that the engT?ider8 are now removing an immenso amount , of earth and rock from tho Culebra , banks. In support of this theory, the engineers call attention to the fiu't that at a point in the canal whore a smaller disturbance occurred tho banks were cut down and there was no repetition of the trouble, thus constituting a strong pres-unption that the proper cure for the so-culled slides had liceu fouud-However, fouud-However, there is ground for the conclusion con-clusion that the reason the smaller movement stopped was because the larger movement at. Culebra hadf-:n The gas, escaping easily nt t nlebra. ceased to go onto the other piano aiui cause eruptions there. Suppose a UMi EMU ilOOttifS, UES SE1M0U MMl I , - VVj ' I ' - , y , ' . j v i y 1 .wIS . " , 4 " , , 1 , , - ' 41 ?, ' ' - Vd I v . . , , - v r K" , Mi J - yj ' 4I f . - Si;..- -J- 'p.' , . V . ' ' : ' ' . ? f - - f . w fa T :.; . m ;:?;::it-i;r'? f - , n J K-- v " w t. V . 1 ;r Vu'r; . . " - - - - " - . v ' v w ' ' :' ' " . ; hJ J) S GAUZAJ7Z) CZST. CZTZfJ?A ZOOWSfG JVOJTTJt WOJVT " - ) --l-- ! ncrox? sv&Gssxs sasTzxxAJWrf zizjrzz&AzrcF zttazwacj? ZJ&CAm, i f v 'l lC- " Jsowrrff 5ZA?rz itjzzczz cat?? up MErfsaMfcdiiait&aaia fy I r --r cztzj-zjm zoozrzjvG1 Jirojrrzr rvaxr, tvszt sajvjs. cotzpzstj? szdcdaz (ZxaaFuwz -as riz & Qjrxorzf juurjes. caosed r x&ssosa; jzai xszotr ken ivat.er pipe in a house is flooding the bath room. If the water main, with which the water pipe is connected, at some point beyond the house bo severed, the water will discharge at tho poiut of the break in the main and ceas to flow in the bath room. It will not mean that the leak in the water pipe has been repaired, but that the water has found another and larger opening through which to escape Once it is established that the gas beneath tho canal bottom . coust's'lho islands of mud and rock and material to riso to the surface, the remedy of course would lie in finding Borne other way or place for those gases to escape. Again, for comparison, the water tap in your house is broken or ' out of commission in your bath room and you are unable to locate where the main water pipe enters your lawn. You got a pail and continue to dip the water out of the tub to keep it from flooding the house. You may continue to dip as long as the water runs. If you cannot can-not locate the feeder or connection to your niiiu, you must cro'to the reservoir and there shut off the main. When the reservoir overflows, chango the course ,"- he- water so that it will not inter- V fere with your residence. This is the condition at Culebra cut. They can ; continue to remove this moving mate- rial that is filling up the water way j with their great powerful dredges, and i hold back the flow for a time, but un- i less the supply is changed to eoino other j course at tho source, it may never Btop until nature changes it. , Geology Still Is Young Science. Of course, I am well aware that there are many skeptics who will insist that the causo and the remedy that I have suggested are unreasonable. I am aware, too, that the fat't that most eminent engineers hare held otherwise is not a strong recommendation for such a theory. However, I am reminded re-minded that some of the most eminent of the world's geologists have been reversed re-versed by nature, and it is not boyond possibility that they may again be wrong, as there are many of the earth's geological conditions that are yet unwritten. I It will doubtless occur to one that, if there is anything in the theory I have advanced, it is strange that no one of the canal or army engineers has advanced or investigated such a possibility. possi-bility. That is just what occurred to me and it is a fact, beyond dispute, that General George W. Goethals and his staff of army, as well as civil, engineers en-gineers are among the best and most wonderful construction engineers that the world has ever produced. The construction, the finish, the perfect completion of the locks and the canal itself command the admiration of the world. They served their purpose well and their great efforts must not fail. There is a problem yet to solve, which is no fault of theirs. They are educated, edu-cated, refined and able gentlemen. They extended every courtesy to me and my engineer; they gave us the courtesy of the government railroad; they extended to us the best of the'goverument electric elec-tric launches to investigate every inch of thtf Culebra cut and the disturbances therein. They freely granted every privilege and every convenience to make . tne investigation and freely i sought any information or suggestions , that might tend to solve the problem which is causing the unfortunate conditions condi-tions at the Culebra cut and preventing passage iu the world's greatest water- j way and the greatest enterprise that 1 has ever been undertaken and built by human hands. They even placed at our disposal one of the best geologists in the government service an eminent and able gentleman, now connected with the geological department in the bureau of mines Donald F. MacDonald, who willingly exchanged his ideas and gladly considered any that we had to offer. While I could not -agree with some of his opinions regarding the situation, sit-uation, yet I respect and admire his ability, but still cling to my own ideas, which can only be considered after the present theory fails. Mine Experience7 Sheds Light. While tho college men have had every ev-ery advantage from a scholarly standpoint, stand-point, one must make some concessions for the man who has acquired his knowledge and education to a great degree de-gree and was trained from early life by actual contact with geological conditions, condi-tions, who has been forced to solve ! these problems involving the actions of the earth with which he was confronted, and who has had long years of experience experi-ence in combating them. Those eminent gentlemen mentioned above may not be mining engineers. They may never have had the opportunity oppor-tunity of many long years of underground under-ground experience and they, too, in time, may bo willing to concede to the practical fellow some knowledge along those lines. j My experience with gases covere 1 thirty years in mines and underground work in almost every capacity from general manager of large productive properties down to tool boy, when I was first employed underground. This period includes experience in Utah, as well as the five adjoining mining states. It is that knowledge and experience ex-perience with careful study and many tests and the analyses of eruptive rocks that has induced mo to place before you some facts in my experience. Actual Precedents Are Cited. For instance, there is a shaft in Park City, in the state of Utah, at the present pres-ent day known as the No. 2 Ontario three-compartment shaft. There was takeu out in the excavation and sinking sink-ing of this shaft some 12,000 cubic feet of material per hundred feet of depth-as depth-as it was originally sunk. Afterward 18,000 cubic. feet of matorial was ta-len ta-len from 100 feet of this shaft each year for fifteen years. A crew of men was employed continuously behind those timbers to keep the shaft open. Oregon Ore-gon fir timbers, twelve inches square, would be broken some times over night. 1 The shaft was sunk some fifteen hun- , I dred feet. The 'whole Bhaft was not closed up i nor moving, but different sections therein. In one section of 300 feet, the management cut around ten or twelve feet of space behind the tira- , J J ZONEOnNO OCfOflMATlOM tptg J J O OO SCO -300 00 300 00 TOO 600 3O0 JQOO ifOO :'TiGirKE S. Ideal cross section to illustrate canal ward deformation movements. THE OFFICIAL THEORY ILLUSTRATED. This map serves to show how tho canal engineers explain the blockades. They assert that the weight of the elevated sides of the canal causes such a pressure upon the earth below that it is forced out and curves upward to the surface In the bed of the canal. bers, putting head-boards and braces to steady the timbers. These would sometimes some-times stand for thirty or sixty days, and at occasional periods only over night. This whole breast of rock would move, crushing the timbers iu the shaft and wedging itself in there so closely that powder would have to be used to remove it. There was no visible rnans of finding out where the rock came from and no known space made vacant oy the supply it was furnishing, fur-nishing, but the movement was continuous, contin-uous, to my knowledge, for fifteen years, until the shaft was abandoned. The reason for keeping it open for this long period was that it was producing produc-ing over a million dollars net in precious metals every year. It was theu owned and controlled by Haggiu and his as-soeiates. as-soeiates. Gas Discovered to Be the Cause. Another experience in the old mine known as the Crescent, in the same district. In driving a tunnel, the track in the bottom would sometimes rise two feet over night. We would remove the material and replace the track and it might stand for thirty days, and then the movement would start again and the whole drift would crowd in. One morning a shift of men under my supervision weDt into the face of this tunnel to drive ahead, and the timbermen completed and installed, just behind the men, a set of twelve- inch square Oregon fir timbers. At 11:30 a. m. the movement 'came and I broke those timbers like matches and j the men on the outside bad to dig ! around the bottom of the timbers in order to get the. men out alive. This set of line new timbers had only been in place and completed three and one-half one-half hours. T took one of the foremost geologists in tins country iu there to investigate. He informed me that it was the great pressure of water above and behind this porphyry or eruptive rock that was carding it to pweli. I believed it for a time and I drove on ahead until we struck another vein of the same kind of materia! and. when I visited my men one morning, they were then iu a hard formation between the two eruptive breaks, or so-called veins. The tunnel they were working in was about five by seven feet. Tho formation was a hard, silicious limestone lime-stone with small specks of porphyry, or trachyte, appearing in it, ami the breast was popping or cracking like cannons on a battlefield. Little, thin scales of rock were breaking off the face of the drift, as thin a a pane of glass. We were puzzled to know what caused tho noise. There mi;st have been some tremendous tre-mendous pressure behind, that was causing caus-ing the chipping off of the rock in the face of the drift. They drilled on some twelve feet farther and the drills passed into soft material. When they did, a terrific pressure of gas came out of the drill openings. They asked mo to come in. They said that there was an air channel and a terriblu pressure of air coming in. They did not realise it was gas and could hardly conceive it was an air channel, because they wero 800 feet vertically below the surface. ' Experiment Bares a Fallacy. The gns was soon discovered, because four or five of the men were overcome by it in a few minutes and had to bo carried out by fresh men. Of course, the men could smell and realized that the air was not fresh, but they thought that the gas had come from the powder that had been used there a few bonn before. We now have drifts in this same property that have been abandoned aban-doned because there was no mineral passing through them, where hundreds of feet aro absolutely closed up. In order to open them again we would have to use as much powder a.s we did in the original excavation, and the only way that one would ever know there had been a drift there would be by finding tho timbers in places smashed into splinters, and in tho cracks and splinters the rocks wedged as tightly as they were before the ground was first opened. I am working a shaft known as the Halifax, at Tonopah, Nevada. It is now 1700 feet deep. There is one section, sec-tion, about 300 feet thick, in that shaft, about 700 foet below the surface, that has to be retimbered and cased off on account of tho peculiar formation it passes through. This rock is moving all the time. There are numerous places tlpit 1 personally came in contact con-tact with in Kureka, Park City, Tonopah Ton-opah and other mining camps, where this same condition exists, and it is impossible to keep an opening or passageway pass-ageway clear, unless you are couuu-uously couuu-uously working at it. My first trip to tho isthmian canal was about February, in 1914. They wero then operating the great dredges in the Culobra cut. . Seeing the dirt and material coining up from beneath the water aud observing the character of the rock, it occurred to me that tbey, too, had come in contact with subterranean subter-ranean troubles and difficulties, and I got some of the rock and had it analyzed: an-alyzed: I then put my engineer to work, going to Park City and different differ-ent points whero wo had those troubles with eruptive rock, filling in with unlimited un-limited material and the gases suffocating suffocat-ing the minors. After my experience with the gases and the drift filling in for great distances, dis-tances, I began to doubt the theory of the geologist who hud informed me that the pressure was iu the rock itself that it was a swelling material, through the weight of water pressure, that was causing this trouble. We took sacks of this material from the places that we knew were continuously continuous-ly moving, also the places that had been filled up. We kiln-dried aud roasted it and pressed it in squares, put it into glass cases and turned water back ou it under pressure, until wc were fully convinced that the theory was wrong. There was ;;o expansion in the rock whatever. When it was kiln-dried and roasted and water put back outo it", it did not even expand enough to break the glass. We also analyzed these rocks, as we did the rock from tho Culebra cut. We found the ingredients about the same. These eruptive, or moving, rocks seem to come from tho same source, from the same cause aud are made up of the same material. Stop and think what causes the 1 fcbocks and tremors which occur every few weeks wbat shook down San Francisco Fran-cisco aud what caused cracks the earth close to Santa Rosa, fifty miles away, where gas discharged for days from openings 500 feet long, where there was never an opening before? These and many other comparisons would tend to convince any thinking man that, iu Central America and Pau-araa, Pau-araa, which is more subject to shocks and tremors than any other part of America, there is some reason iu the theory that 1 have advanced. Should time prove that this theory has merit worthy of consideration and there is anything I can do, tho&o in charge have but to command me. My interest in this is merely patriotic, with sincere good wishes for the success of the isthmian canal. I have watched it closely since the American government secured ownership thereof from Frauce. I had the honor of sitting in the senate sen-ate of the United States as a member from the state of Utah. I favored the building of the gn-at enterprise wlieu the purchase isas made. |