Panama Canal’s Future Depends on Accommodating Wider Loads
Panama Canal’s Future Depends on Accommodating Wider Loads
When it opened in 1914, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the Panama Canal not only changed how goods move across the world: It defied gravity.
In the late 19th century, the French had tried building a sea-level canal through Panama that ignored water’s inevitable flow downward. It was aborted after 22,000 Frenchmen died of tropical diseases; their burial sites still line the outer ring of the canal. The United States finally built it nearly right, thanks to President Theodore Roosevelt and some US-backed rebellions that helped Panama gain independence from Colombia.
Now, a massive $5 billion infrastructure project is attempting nothing less than to master gravity again, and, in the process, to tame the flows of globalization. The 26,000 Panamanian workers who are now making the canal deeper and wider designate the Atlantic as North and the Pacific as South. For ships to rise or fall with these waters, the canal has a complicated system of locks where vessels are isolated and water flows in or out to move them up or down. The locks will be made more modern and streamlined; huge slabs of concrete mark the eventual home of these steel compartments.
Panamanians, who gained control over the canal after a politically bruising fight in the US Senate in the late 1970s, overwhelmingly voted for the expansion in a 2006 referendum. But the United States is a close partner. The two countries are still inextricably linked. There is no continental waterway in the United States; Panama is our cut-through. With 65 percent of canal cargo traffic originating in or destined for the United States, the changes here are being carefully followed by American industries looking to speed up transport of goods. The expansion is all about eliminating “dwell time.”