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Show Busy Again in Panama Zone Shovels Claw Way for New Defense Channel and Bomb-Proof Locks. WASHINGTON. Earth is flying in the Panama Canal Zone, where Uncle Sam is spending some $600,-000,000 $600,-000,000 to modernize the isthmian waterway. Rock and earth is being blasted sky high. Steam shovels are groaning groan-ing as great steel jaws gnaw into the sun-baked hills. Dirt trains are hurrying along hastily laid tracks to haul away the debris left behind by dynamite gangs and the greedy bites of shovels shov-els wielded by mechanical giants. The early canal construction days have been revived on the isthmus without the horrors of the yellow fever and malaria that once made gringos shiver in the sun. Remnants of those hardy pioneers are gray-haired men today, dwellers dwell-ers in the mild climates of Florida and California, but they spend their savings to revisit the isthmus and see how the new hombres get things done. Easier There Now. They say things are a lot easier down there now. Water, for one thing, may be drunk without calling call-ing a hearse. Mosquitoes no longer fly on the wings of death. The ear-roaring produced by daily quinine doses no longer is heard. For Uncle Sam has cleaned up the one-time pest-hole and recently some 10,000 new civilian workers have gone down to the zone to help Install the $277,000,000 set of bombproof bomb-proof locks for the navy's exclusive use. The new channel and locks will be a half mile away from the existing exist-ing ones. An additional $323,000,000 is being spent for secret protective works in and around the existing waterway, and for enlarging other defense, housing, electrical, water supply and transportation facilities on the Isthmus. All these new activities have caused a sudden increase in civilian population of the little Canal Zone, an area only five miles wide along each bank of the 50 miles of channel from ocean to ocean. Population Jumps Official figures show the American Ameri-can civilian population has jumped from the normal of 2,700 to about 6,500 since the new construction work got under way a little over a year ago. The population of imported alien laborers, recruited from West Indian In-dian islands and surrounding republics, repub-lics, jumped from 13,000 to about 20,000. None of these figures include the large numbers of increased army, navy and marine personnel sent to the isthmus for defense purposes. |
