Transportation
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The Tamiami Trail was crucial to opening the wilderness and linking Florida's major cities as the first road to cross the Everglades. Tamiami combined the names Tampa and Miami, the two cities it connected. Surveyors and clearing crews cut through thick underbrush with hand saws and machetes, blasting crews used a specially designed drill car and dynamite to break solid limestone into rubble, giant Bay City walking dredges piled the blasted rock into a rough roadbed, a bulldozer flattened and smoothed the rock, soil, and sand, and trucks and tractors fine-graded the road and applied an asphalt surface to seal it and prevent erosion. The work was grueling, with heat, humidity, mosquitoes, alligators, and venomous snakes creating constant hardships and dangers, while workers lived on the job in portable bunkhouses with rolling kitchens. Opened on April 26, 1928, after 13 years of difficult and expensive work, the road was celebrated as an engineering feat often compared to the building of the Panama Canal.
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