One day while the Gatun dam was in the earlier stages of its construction in 1908, a newspaper correspondent was temporarily detained at Gatun while crossing the Isthmus. Idly, to pass the time away, he strolled out on the dam to where he saw a group of men gathered. He found them discussing a small break at the edge of the dam upstream; a break not caused by any pressure of the water, for the water had not reached that point, but by the weight of the heavy superstructure pressing upon the semi-fluid core of the dam which then had not had sufficient time for drainage and drying. The dispatch which the correspondent sent north as the result of his casual observation of the slide, was seized upon by the advocates of the sea-level canal as a text from which to argue the entire impracticability of the lake-level project. The agitation became so general and so menacing that President Roosevelt was impelled to appoint a commission of seven engineers of high professional standing and technical knowledge of dam building to visit the spot and report upon the menace. Their verdict was that the Canal engineers had gone far beyond the necessary point in making the dam ponderous and safe. Secretary of War Taft, who happened to be on the Isthmus when the break occurred, declared that it was “insignificant when one takes into consideration the whole size of the dam”. When the tricky Chagres gets on one of its rainy season rages the spillway by which the dam is pierced at about its center will be one of the spectacular points on the Canal line. That river drains a basin covering 1,320 square miles, and upon which the rains in their season fall with a persistence and continuity known in hardly any other corner of the earth. The Chagres has been known to rise as much as 40 feet in 24 hours, and though even this great flood will be measurably lowered by being distributed over the 164 square miles in Gatun Lake, yet some system of controlling it by outlets and flood gates was of course essential to the working and the safety of the Canal. The spillway is the center of this system, the point at which is the machinery by which the surface of Gatun Lake can be at all times kept within two feet of its normal level, which is 85 feet above the level of the sea. [Illustration: PARTLY COMPLETED SPILLWAY, 1913 The river was low when this picture was taken. At high water it will flow over the completed structure shown at the right]