mikemike
Matrix Hero

Posts: 501
Joined: 6/3/2004 From: a maze of twisty little passages, all different Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Terminus Bywater had a better idea than destroying the locks by floatplane or submarine attack. He had the Japs load a freighter to the gunvales with explosives, and then sent it through the canal before war broke out, detonating in the middle and causing big landslides to block the waterway. There is a story by C.S.Forester (Hornblower) in much the same vein. IIRC (I don't have that collection of stories at hand) the malefactor was a German ship posing as Swedish, loaded with iron ore; the plan was to enter a lock, fire torpedos from concealed underwater tubes into the lock gates, and blow the bottom out of the ship, thus creating a giant heap of scrap in the lock chamber. The plan was foiled by an attentive British DEMS gunner who recognized German-style shoes on the feet of one of the supposed Swedes. The attack was timed to coincide with the PH attack. I've seen a TV documentary about the canal a short time ago; they showed how a lock gate leaf was swapped by a large floating crane, and as far as I am concerned, the most vulnerable spot of a gate would be the upper pivot point (the lower pivot is just a fireplug-shaped lump of steel, maybe three feet in diameter, concreted into the floor of the lock chamber - looked pretty impervious to anything short of a nuclear device) - but I don't think this would be an easy matter. Causing a landslide in the Culebra Cut would be feasible, too, but this happens frequently, anyway, so the Canal Authority is equipped to clear that kind of obstruction as quickly as possible. Most damaging would be to blow up the Gatun Dam which would drain the Gatun Lake and b*gger up the water supply for several months after the dam was closed again, and that without taking into consideration the damage the resulting flood wave would do to the Canal infrastructure. But as far as I know, the Gatun Dam is essentially a large earth dike, and pretty resistant to blasting. To sum up, you could probably close the Canal for months if only you could get maybe 10 ktons of TNT in the right place. Piece of cake, obviously.
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