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Panama Adding a Wider Shortcut for Shipping
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Excavation is an initial step in the building of a larger set of locks for the Panama Canal that should double the amount of
goods that can pass through it each year.
By HENRY FOUNTAIN
Published: August 16, 2011
COCOL, Panama For now, the future of global shipping is little
more than a hole in the ground here, just a short distance from the
Pacific Ocean.
Ah, but what a hole it is.
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About a mile long, several hundred
feet wide and more than 100 feet deep,
the excavation is an initial step in the
building of a larger set of locks for the
Panama Canal that should double the
amount of goods that can pass through
it each year.
Panoramas: Expanding the
Shortcut Between the Seas
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The $5.25 billion project, scheduled
for completion in 2014, is the first expansion in the history
of the century-old shortcut between the Atlantic and
Pacific. By allowing much bigger container ships and other
cargo vessels to easily reach the Eastern United States, it
will alter patterns of trade and put pressure on East and
Gulf Coast ports like Savannah, Ga., and New Orleans to
deepen harbors and expand cargo-handling facilities.
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Right now, with its two lanes of locks that can handle ships
up to 965 feet long and 106 feet wide a size known as
Panamax the canal operates at or near its capacity of
about 35 ships a day. During much of the year, that can
mean dozens of ships are moored off each coast, waiting a
day or longer to enter the canal.
The new third set of locks will help eliminate some of those
backlogs, by adding perhaps 15 passages to the daily total.
More important, the locks will be able to handle New
Panamax ships 25 percent longer, 50 percent wider and,
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Panama Expands Canal to Increase Shipping Capacity - NYTimes.com
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with a deeper draft as well, able to carry two or three times
the cargo.
No one can predict the full impact of the expansion. But for
starters, it should mean faster and cheaper shipping of
some goods between the United States and Asia.
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Dean Campbell, a soybean farmer from Coulterville, Ill., for
instance, expects the expansion will help him compete with
farmers in South America which, he said, has much
poorer infrastructure for getting the grain out.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Work is under way to build a larger set
of locks for the Panama Canal that
should double the amount of goods
that can pass through it each year.
Readers Comments
Readers shared their thoughts
on this article.
The canal expansion will have a definite impact on us, Mr.
Campbell said. We think in general it will be a good thing,
we just dont know how good.
Jean Paul Rodrigue, a professor of global studies and
geography at Hofstra University who has studied the
expansion project, said that the shipping industry was
waiting to see how big the impact would be. They know its
going to change things, but theyre not sure of the scale.
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For now the hole, parallel to the existing smaller Pacific
locks and about a half-mile away, is a scene of frenetic
activity by workers and machines laboring in the tropical
haze. At one end, giant hydraulic excavators scoop blasted rock into a parade of earth
movers that dump it topside on a slowly growing mountain of rubble. At the other, where
the machines have finished their work, a pack of about 50 men buzzes over the rock floor,
preparing it to serve as a foundation for a bed of concrete.
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That slab will be one small building block for the immense structures to come: three 1,400foot-long locks, water-filled chambers that will serve as stair steps, raising or lowering
ships a total of 85 feet. An identical set of locks will be built on the Atlantic side.
Once an Atlantic-bound ship leaves the new Pacific locks, it would join the existing canal at
the Culebra Cut an eight-mile channel through the continental divide and then steam
across Gatn Lake to the new Atlantic locks for the trip back down to sea level. In all, the 51
-mile passage will take about half a day, as it does now.
The expansion is being financed with loans from development banks to be repaid through
tolls that currently reach several hundred thousand dollars for large ships. The project is
huge by Panamas standards; among other things, the countrys largest rock-crushing plant
has sprung up, almost overnight, to turn the mountain of excavated rubble into sand and
stone for the concrete.
It is hardly the biggest infrastructure project in the world, but this is the one that has the
most foreign impact, said Jorge L. Quijano, an executive vice president of the Panama
Canal Authority, which has operated the canal since the United States handed it to Panama
more than a decade ago. And I think it is the one that has the most impact on the United
States.
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But the impact will probably be greatest in the United States, the destination or origin of
about two-thirds of the goods that pass through the canal.
Like the construction of the original canal, an engineering masterpiece that opened in 1914
after 10 years of work by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, the expansion project
is a daunting task, but for different reasons.
The corps had to tackle tropical diseases that had killed thousands of workers during an
earlier failed effort by the French. It had to excavate and, crucially, dispose of tens of
millions of cubic yards of dirt and rock. And it built locks that were then the worlds
largest.
They were the best engineers in the world, ever, said Alberto Alemn Zubieta, the chief
executive of the canal authority. Today Ive got computers, technology, super equipment.
Those guys did this in 10 years, under the most difficult conditions ever.
The biggest questions today concern whether, in a country and region marked by official
corruption, the canal authority, an autonomous agency of the Panamanian government,
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can handle such an undertaking. Panamas vice president, Juan Carlos Varela, was
reported to have privately called the project a disaster in 2009, according to an American
diplomatic memo made public last year by WikiLeaks. Mr. Varela described the main
contractors, Spanish and Italian firms, as weak.
But authority executives say they have had nothing but support from the government. They
claim that the project is on time and under budget, and that the authority has the
engineering and management skill to complete it.
Some outsiders agree. We are quite impressed with how the project is being run, said
Byron Miller, a spokesman for the Port of Charleston in South Carolina, which is spending
$1.3 billion over 10 years on improvements to handle the additional cargo from the canal
and other routes.
Expansion of the canal was first proposed in the 1930s to accommodate large United States
warships, and excavation for larger locks began in 1939 but was stopped during World War
II. The current project was approved in a national referendum in 2006.
Deeper approach channels are being dredged on both coasts. And on the Pacific side, crews
are excavating a long channel that will connect the new locks to the Culebra Cut. The
channel through Gatn Lake is being widened so that larger ships can pass each other.
The new locks, which will account for about half the cost of the project, will work on the
same principle used by the existing ones: moved solely by gravity, water is fed into or
emptied from the chambers, raising or lowering the ships inside. But the new locks will use
a different kind of gate at the end of each chamber, which should make maintenance easier
and less disruptive. They will also have a feature found on some canals in Europe: three
shallow basins next to each lock that will store water and reuse it. With the basins, the new
locks will use about four million fewer gallons of water for each ships passage through the
canal than the much smaller existing locks. Even so, to ensure there is enough, the project
will raise the level of Gatn Lake, which supplies the water for the locks, by about a foot
and a half.
Water use would not seem to be much of an issue in rain-soaked Panama. But Gatn Lake
serves as a drinking water supply as well. And the water level has to be monitored so there
is enough stored for use by the canal during the dry season, roughly January to April. If the
level is too low the authority has to reduce the amount of water for each passage, which
means the deepest-draft ships cannot use the canal unless they unload some cargo.
Water quality is an issue as well. The new locks and basins will allow more saltwater into
Gatn Lake, although the canal authority insists that the effect will be small and that steps
can be taken to mitigate the problem if necessary.
The water-saving basins, with an elaborate system of culverts and valves to divert water to
and from the chambers, may be the projects most technologically challenging part.
Operators will use computer controls that are a far cry from the electromechanical ones,
with brass and glass indicators and chrome valve handles, that were used from 1914 until
just a few years ago.
Despite the systems complexities, Mr. Quijano, the canal authority official, insisted that
the authority was capable of carrying it out successfully. We have not invented anything
that has not been invented before, he said.
Mr. Alemn, the authoritys chief executive, also expressed confidence in the projects
overall success, saying his managers draw lessons from those who worked a century ago.
We have a very high standard to live up to, he said.
A version of this article appeared in print on August 17, 2011, on page
A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Panama Adding a Wider
Shortcut for Shipping.
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