Rotary Club of Qualicum Beach Sunrise

QB SUNRISE


SCUTTLEBUTT

The QB Sunrise Scuttlebutt is a weekly publication that highlights the activities of the Rotary Club of Qualicum Beach Sunrise.



Last Week in Rotary


Shelter Box; Did You Know?


In each of the last two years District 5020 has sponsored more ShelterBoxes in North America than any other District! For more information or to donate please go to: www.shelterbox.ca


Annual General Meeting Dec 8


The Election for our 2010-11 Board was finalized at our AGM held on Dec 8.

1. President Nominee 2011-12 – Allan Gannon
2. Officers – David Lavalley – President Elect; Ken Walker – Secretary; Peter Kellas – Treasurer; Ken Needen – Past President
3. Directors – George Venner; Bob Brown; Doug Arbo; Larry Mix; Gerry Herkel

President Ken indicated that we will need to elect one more Director and that will happen at our Dec 22 meeting.


Society Annual General Meeting


The Society AGM was also held at our Dec 8 meeting and the Society Financial Report was approved as presented.



This Week in Rotary


Board Meeting Cancelled


President Ken announced that the Board Meeting scheduled for December 22 has been canceled – too many Christmas things happening. I understand that the only piece of business that the Board will need to deal with in the next week is a report from Terry regarding the Antique Fair.


Club Assembly


Next Tuesday December 22nd is Club Assembly. Ken hopes to have the Antique Fair proposal presented and a decision made as to whether to go ahead with the Fair
December 22 Activity Roster

1. Greeter – Derek Jay
2. 50-50 – Stuart Jackson
3. Rotary Moment – David Lavalley
4. Invocation – Ed Fougner

December 15 Christmas Dinner




Kudos to Ron and Larry for planning and arranging a great Christmas Dinner and party

Pat and I arrived at Rotary House with guests Judy and Ray Marsh just after 5:30 and had a wonderful mingle with friends – much kibitzing and Christmas greetings – lots of cheek kissing happening. Tasty hors de oeuvres were served by our Galloping Gourmet Hostess; Gerry Herkel presided at the Bar. At 6:30 precisely we sat down to dinner.




Lavalley’s, Gannon’s and Herkels




Stothers, Ball’s and the Brown’s




Venner’s, Eleanor Mix, and the soon to be Lynch clan




The Kellas’s and Team Beckingham (Celyne arrived later)




The Arbo’s, Fougner’s and Marsh’s




President Ken and Dallas, the Sly’s and the Brown’s




The Williams family, Terry and Anna Horsley and John Medd

Allen delivers the Invocation


The menu included Turkey and stuffing and Ham and everything else you would expect at a Christmas Dinner catered by Galloping Gourmet – it was delicious.




Mike and Tami search for room on their plates for one more goody.




Larry thanks the staff of Galloping Gourmet to a rousing round of applause from all present.


What did we do for fun before Lauren Gannon arrived? Lauren has a never ending bag of entertaining events and the next one is always more fun than the last. Christmas Charades involved each group acting out a Christmas Carol and the Carols weren’t necessarily your old favorites.




Lauren explains the rules! – And much inventiveness and bedlam ensued!




Team Lavalley baffles us with their antics!




Team Williams - confusion reigns!




Can anyone figure these guy’s out?




Not a Wise Man in the bunch!




Pretty much a one man show here. I think George said “you guys just sit and be quiet, I’ll handle this”




Nuff said!

And the winners – lets hear it for Team Arbo

And the not so disgruntled losers – yeah Team Venner

The Panama Canal Story

Pat and I have just returned from a Holland America Cruise that took us from San Diego, through the Panama Canal, to Ft. Lauderdale. The highlight of the trip was the transit of the Canal. Prior to leaving I had read David McCullough’s “The Path Between The Seas; The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870 – 1914”. The books not an easy read but its chalk full of information that makes the passage much more interesting. We were scheduled to weigh anchor at 6:00 am on the morning of Dec 7 and Pat and I were on Deck by 6:30 and remained there until just after 4 in the afternoon when we cleared the Gatun Locks and entered the Caribbean. The passage was so interesting I want to share it with all of you.






Contrary to general belief the canal does not run east to west, it does in fact run from north to south. The cities on either side are Panama City and Balboa in the south on the Pacific side and Colon in the north on the Caribbean side. The Canal stretches 65km from shoreline to shoreline, and has three sets of locks each of which has two lanes. These locks serve as lifts, elevating vessels 85 feet above sea level to Gatun Lake. – Pedro Miguel and Miraflores Locks on the Pacific side and Gatun Locks to the north on the Caribbean side. By utilizing the canal ships shorten their journey by 15000 km, compared to sailing around Cape Horn. Both Balboa and Colon are huge Container Ports with ships off loading containers which then travel either across the Isthmus by rail or south into South America and north into Central America. The cost of a single transit for a modern large Container ship exceeds $250,000 US.




On our way to the first locks we pass the very busy Container Port of Balboa




Gatun Lake


To understand the Canal it’s best to start in the middle; namely at Gatun Lake, which when it was created in about 1910 was the largest man made lake in the world. One of the major challenges for the French in their attempts to build the canal in the 19th century was to tame the Chagres River which flows from the central mountains of the continental divide north to flow into the Caribbean. Rainfall in Panama exceeds 200 inches per year and that amount falls during the rainy season from June to November. During the rainy season the Chagres becomes a mad torrent with river levels raising as much as 3 feet in a few hours. The French really never did have either an engineering plan that coped with flooding during construction nor did they ever solve how they could utilize the river as part of the Canal. The French plan was to build a sea level Canal without locks as they had done at Suez,– but Panama proved to be a very different and difficult challenge.


Another engineering challenge was breaching the 13 kilometer long continental divide which runs down the Pacific side of the Isthmus. The French, in the 18th century, had started to excavate what became known as the Gillard Cut and to excavate to sea level, a daunting task.


American interests took on the project in 1904 and they were faced with 4 major issues:

1. Should they build a lockless canal at sea level?
2. How would they tame the Chagres River?
3. How would they move and where would they deposit the hundreds of millions of cubic meters of earth excavated from the Gillard cut?
4. How could they solve the problem of disease, namely Yellow Fever and Malaria that had killed over 21,000 French Workers?

Entering the Gillard Cut


The Americans wisely discarded the idea of a sea level canal because to do so would have meant removing over 1 billion cubic meters of earth from the Gillard Cut. This was a key decision because it enabled them to solve the Chagres River dilemma – the solution was brilliant, dam up the Chagres at Gatun on the Caribbean side and let the dammed waters back up to create a giant man made lake that would extend south through the Gillard Cut.
The lake to be used as the means of transit between the Pacific locks in the south and the Caribbean locks in the north.




The Chagres Dam from Gatun Lake




The earth filled Chagres Dam stretches 1.5 miles from the spillway shown in the previous photo to the Gatun Locks. The bottom of the dam is .5 miles wide.




Panama City and the Causeway to Fuerte Amadore The 2 kilometer long Causeway was created with fill from the Gillard Cut.


The problem of earth removal from the Gillard Cut was solved when the Company hired John Stevens a railroad man as Chief Engineer. Multiple rail lines were constructed at various levels of the excavation. Locomotives pulled the empty cars past huge Steam Shovels; one scoop per car filled the car and the cars moved continuously by the Shovels, never stopping.

1. Loaded cars traveled south to dump into Panama Bay eventually forming a 2 kilometer causeway that joined the Islands now called Fuerte Amadore with the mainland. The Causeway also serves as a breakwater for Panama Bay.
2. As well a line ran north toward the mouth of the Chagres River near Gatun where fill was dumped to build the Chagres River Dam. The dam itself is 1.5 miles in length and is nearly 0.5 mile wide at its base. The construction of the dam involved constructing 2 walls along its length using the excavated rock from the Gillard Cut. The space between these 2 walls was then built up with impervious clay. This clay gradually dried and hardened into a solid mass almost equal to concrete in its water-resistant properties. This dam contains 16.9 million cubic meters of rock and clay, equivalent too about one tenth of the entire excavation of the canal.
3. Another problem faced at the Gillard Cut was landslides, during construction there were over 24 slides, several of them being major and necessitating many months delay in re-excavating. The cause of these slides was first of all the torrential rainfall during the rainy season but more serious was the clay soils they were working in which proved to be incredibly unstable as the excavations got deeper. In the end, while the bottom of the excavation was 300 meters wide the top was more than 1500 meters in width.

To stabilize the earth and prevent landslides many steel rods have been inserted into the bank


In the 19th Century it was thought that Malaria and Yellow Fever came from the overturned dirt and mud in the tropical jungles. It wasn’t until the early 20th century that the villain was identified as the mosquito. John Stevens, very soon after his appointment provided the budget and hired medical personnel that very quickly (within 1 year) focused on the breeding capability of the insects by eliminating standing water. The result was immediate and in the 10 years of construction between 1904 and 1914 - 7,000 workers lost their lives, most to accidents associated with dynamite blasting – compare that to the French losses of 21,000 and you appreciate the impact of disease on the work force.


The construction of the locks, by comparison with the other challenges was a fairly routine engineering challenge; however there are things about the Panama locks that are interesting and unique.

1. Each lock is 33.53 meters (110 feet) wide by 304.8 meters (1,000 feet) long and can accommodate ships: 32.3 meters (106 feet) in beam; 294.3 meters (965 feet) long.
2. Fed by gravity from Gatun Lake into each set of locks, the water enters the locks’ chambers through a system of drains that extends under every lock chamber from the center and side walls. An average of 55 million gallons of fresh water is used, and takes about eight minutes to fill each chamber.
3. The original giant gates are still being used and are so efficient that they were originally opened and closed by a 50 HP motor
4. Ships operate under there own power as they move through the locks but railway cars called Mules on either side of the ship and connected by cable to the ship keep the ships aligned in the locks.

Bridge of the Americas connects the Pan American Highway. As our ship sails towards the Miraflores Locks we passed under the bridge. Notice the Port and Starboard. Channel Markers that mark the passage to the first Locks and the entrance to the Canal




As we enter the second lock at Miraflores the ship ahead of us sails into Miraflores Lake on its way to the Pedro Miguel locks.




The gates open and we move into the last lock a Miraflores




As we enter the Pedro Miguel locks you can see the ship ahead of us on Gatun Lake and just entering the Gillard Cut.




On Gatun Lake entering the Gillard Cut




We pass a Container Ship in Gatun Lake. Large ships enter the locks, at either end of the Canal, in the morning moving south and north respectively. (So each morning on the Pacific side all of the traffic through the side by side locks is one way – northbound; while traffic on the Caribbean side is all southbound) This enables ships to pass in the widest part of Gatun Lake – large ships cannot pass in the Gillard Cut.




We enter the Gatun Locks as a Container Ship ahead leaves the lock and sails into the Caribbean. Notice that the lock beside us holds another ship bound for the Caribbean.




The massive gates in the locks are the original gates installed in 1914




It’s a tight fit for for the Container Ship in the adjacent Lock. Notice the 2 Mules with cables attached to the ship. With very little clearance the 60 ton Mules keep the ship on the straight and narrow but they do not pull the ship, the ship proceeds on its own power.




We are back at sea level in the Caribbean and the Pilot boat comes along side to pick up the Pilot who has been in command throughout our Canal transit.


Finally, in 2014 the Canal will celebrate its Centenary and for that occasion they will be opening up a second set of twin locks built to accommodate today’s and tomorrows larger ships. Construction is well underway as can be seen in the following 2 photos.