Panama prepares for giant ships
By Traci Carl
Associated Press
MIRAFLORES LOCKS, Panama — Creeping between the jungle and crowds of eager tourists, the oil tanker slides along a ribbon of murky water that makes up the Panama Canal's locks.
Associated Press
Taut chains running from the ship's hull to nearby locomotives hold the massive tanker steady as its scuffed metal sides pass only inches from the lock's own scraped walls. A strong gust — and the ship carrying crude from the Caribbean to El Salvador would meet the lock's worn walls with a loud thump.
An electric-powered locomotive guides a vessel through the Gatun locks of the Panama Canal at Colon. Ships use their own power to move through the narrow strait of the canal while four locomotives, two on each bank of the canal, use cables to keep each vessel centered through the chambers.
Ten percent of the world's ships are unable to pass through the narrow waterway, and the canal — hoping to remain one of the fastest and easiest shipping routes between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans — is undergoing its most extensive expansion since workers carved the 50-mile watery path through Panama's mountains.
"If we want to maintain Panama as a route of preference, we have to look at expanding the canal," Panama Canal administrator Alberto Aleman Zubieta said. "We have to adjust the canal to the dimensions that the industry has already decided on."
Many of the state-of-the-art cruise ships, including many that ply Hawai'i's waters, are new "Panamax" ships — the largest vessels that can make it through the Panama Canal — measuring more than 960 feet and carrying more than 2,100 passengers.
The 91,000-ton, 965-foot Celebrity Infinity, the largest cruise ship ever to visit Hawai'i last year, is one of those. Its voyage to the Islands a year ago — at the time only the second for the French-built ship — represented the first foray into Hawai'i for upscale Celebrity Cruises, and brought a ship that industry proponents say will launch a new era in cruising in the state.
The Infinity was followed in October by Royal Caribbean's Radiance of the Seas and Carnival Cruise Lines' Spirit, and in December by Norwegian Cruise Line's Star.
To accommodate the huge cruise ships, and other bigger vessels being built, the canal has agreed to pay a Belgian-French consortium $1.6 million to come up with a design for a third set of locks that would be nearly twice as wide, 40 percent longer and 25 percent deeper than the existing locks, allowing giant ships that haven't even been designed yet to pass through the canal.
Still, the biggest challenge might not be designing the locks — but finding the water that will allow them to operate.
The canal functions the same way it has since it opened 87 years ago: by gravity. Boats are lifted into and lowered from a series of lakes and canals by locks that fill with water, then drain. Each operation uses 55 million gallons of water that is spilled — and never recovered — from the freshwater Gatun Lake above.
A new set of locks would require more water than Gatun Lake can provide. Engineers are studying the possibility of recycling water and building a second lake farther up in the mountains, pumping the extra water down to Gatun, possibly through giant pipes or a river.
Since taking control of the canal from the United States in 1999, Panama has run the waterway like a for-profit business rather than a nonprofit government entity. It has focused on cutting costs and modernizing, recently finishing a project to replace the mechanical systems that used to open the locks' gates with hydraulic technology.
Many U.S. conservatives feared that Panama would mismanage the canal. But Aleman Zubieta notes that it has finished several expansion and modernization projects years ahead of schedule, including a $300 million project that widened an 8-mile stretch called the Culebra Cut and boosted the canal's traffic potential by 20 percent.
Officials also have begun a $190 million, seven-year project to deepen Gatun Lake, digging a 3-foot-deep path along the lake bottom that follows the canal's shipping route.
The projects are intended to ensure that ever-growing grain and oil tankers continue to use the narrow waterway.
Between 1998 and 2000, the number of Panamax boats crossing the canal increased by 5 percent to 35.4 percent of canal traffic.
Pushed by a growing world economy, the shipping industry is building larger boats.
Sometimes the Panamax boats, which are more than 100 feet wide, clog the canal and create days-long waits that discourage smaller ships from using the waterway, said Basil Brentwood, a logistics director for New York-based Cargo International Logistics Inc.
"It's a panic there sometimes," he said.
