Costa Rican Company Part Of Consortium To
Excavate Panama Canal Extension
Costa Rica's Meco will be joining the
Spanish construction company FCC and
Mexico's ICA as part of a consortium for the
dry excavation of the Panama Canal extension
in a contract worth us$267.8 million
dollars.
The consortium beat out Belgium's Jan de Nul,
Brazil's Oderbrecht and the ISC Panama
consortium to win the contract, the second
most lucrative of the $5.25 billion canal
expansion plan.
According to the specifications laid out by
the Panama Canal Authority at the start of
the bidding process, the project involves
excavating a new channel that will link a
new set of locks - yet to be constructed -
with the Gaillard Cut, the canal's narrowest
stretch.
The winning consortium offered to carry out
the dry-excavation work for a total cost of
$267,798,795, well below the $294,913,000
offered by ISC Panama, which finished
runner-up.
This was the last bidding process of the
canal expansion plan and will involve the
excavation and removal of some 27 million
cubic metres of material.
The work will involve opening a 6.1 km
access channel as well as the construction
of a large earth and rock dam with a
watertight clay core.
PCA administrator Alberto Aleman Zubieta
told EFE Tuesday that the idea is for this
latest dry-excavation project to be
completed by 2013. The entire canal
expansion is due to be finished in 2014.
In July, a consortium led by Spain's Sacyr
Vallehermoso construction company won a $3
billion contract for the third set of locks
for the Panama Canal.
The canal, designed in 1904 for ships with a
267-metre length and 28-metre beam, is too
small to handle the 'post-Panama' ships that
are three times as big, making it necessary
to expand by building the new set of locks.
The Panama Canal Authority, a government
agency that manages the waterway, wants to
double transit capacity.
The 80-km canal, which currently handles
about five percent of world trade, has been
under Panamanian management since Dec 31,
1999, when the US surrendered it in keeping
with the 1977 Torrijos-Carter treaties.
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