Panama Canal opening anniversary

As feats of engineering and logisitics go, the Panama Canal is a pretty good one. It also turns out that today is the anniversary of the first day it opened to traffic - courtesy of Wikipedia's "On This Day" section. Interesting thing - I had no idea that that canal had so much competition out there. I would have thought it posessed a fairly unique purpose and position in the world. Goes to show - there is no such thing as job security, even for geographic features.