This post has nothing to do with gay rights or politics, but given that my mother's father worked on building the Panama Canal and made enough money to put himself through medical school and ultimately invest in Central America, I continue to follow events in Panama and Honduras. Thus, it was of interest that Panama is in the process of doing a major upgrade to the Panama Canal which when completed will double the amount of goods that will be able to transit from the Pacific Ocean to the Caribbean and Atlantic. Here are highlights from the New York Times:
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.
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.
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, with a deeper draft as well, able to carry two or three times the cargo.
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 Panama’s standards; among other things, the country’s largest rock-crushing plant has sprung up, almost overnight, to turn the mountain of excavated rubble into sand and stone for the concrete.
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 world’s largest.
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 Gatún 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 ship’s passage through the canal than the much smaller existing locks
The water-saving basins, with an elaborate system of culverts and valves to divert water to and from the chambers, may be the project’s 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 system’s 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.
It's an amazing project and perhaps one day I will get to visit Panama. Who knows, given the way the USA under the GOP is rushing towards backwardness and is lagging behind many Latin American nations on LGBT rights, the boyfriend and I might even retire to a country like Panama.
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