Flipping Book | The Journey | Salini Impregilo Library

17 The Journey Prologue « The world was so new that many things lacked names and in order to indicate them, it was necessary to point. » On the small strip of land, running from West to East, connecting North and South America and serving as a buff- er between two powerful oceans, these words – borrowed from the fanciful pen of Gabriel Garcìa Marquez, the hero of Latin American literature – fully express the euphoric astonishment felt by the men called upon to do it all over again. Nearly 100 years after the first mounds of earth were dug up with shovels and pickaxes by pioneers, who first brought the Panama Canal to life in 1914. Before the eyes of these new arrivals, during a rainy August in 2009, nature re- vealed its true self: wild and untouched. Crocodiles, snakes, capybara, sloths and monos aulladores , the screaming monkeys that act as noisy messengers for all the animals of the forest. Experts, hired to catalog and protect the denizens of this ecosystem during a long period of observation and study, counted between 400-500 species. Be- cause the main goal of the construction sitethatwastobesetupoverthenext few months, was to protect the environment starting with the flora and fauna that populated it. Doing so required setting up video recorders and cameras with so- phisticated sensors, able to register the life of the forest during the silent nights. It is the best way to observe the wildlife, to understand how many species inhab- it the area where the work will be done, and to evaluate how to remove them from harm’s way without compromising the ecosystem. And, when everything is ready to go, to request the help of spe- cialized teams to complete the task and