Work to Begin Soon on New Set of Locks
for Panama Canal
By Hernan Martin
Panama – One hundred years after the
first blocks of cement were placed in 1909
for construction of the Panama Canal, the interoceanic waterway through which 983,000
ships have sailed during a century of
operations, a new set of locks is being
built that will allow passage of the new,
larger ships of the 21st century.
Though no inaugural ceremony has been
scheduled, on Tuesday the Grupo Unidos por
el Canal begins the countdown of the 1,883
days it has allotted for building the new
locks that will permit the passage of bigger
vessels than existed at the beginning of the
last century.
GUPC, headed by the Spanish company
Sacyr-Vallehermoso and including Italy’s
Impregilo, Belgium’s Jan De Nul Group and
Panama’s Constructora Urbana, still has not
set a date for the first movements of land
that the project requires, and which it has
contracted to carry out for $3.12 billion.
The beginning of construction coincides with
the centenary of pouring the first cement
for construction of the present locks on
Aug. 24, 1909, less than six years after
Panamanian independence, for which the canal
project was a determining factor.
Such a project was initially proposed in
1532, just 19 years after Vasco Nuñez de
Balboa first crossed the Isthmus of Panama
to the Pacific Ocean, when Charles V ordered
topographical studies to build a canal that
would cross the isthmus to facilitate the
voyages of ships bearing treasures from Peru
to Spain.
But due to complexities of the work and the
economic requirements, the idea was never
carried out until the end of the 19th
century, when it was at last taken into
serious consideration.
The Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps, who
between 1859 and 1869 had built the Suez
Canal in Egypt, undertook a repetition of
his feat on the Isthmus of Panama in 1880.
But his stubborn insistence that it must be
a sea-level canal like Suez, along with
tropical diseases and administrative
inefficiency, ended the undertaking in one
of the biggest financial scandals of the
era.
The United States, one of the countries that
stood to benefit most from the construction,
bought the rights from De Lesseps and, faced
with the difficulty of obtaining the
concession from Colombia to build a canal
through what was then the Colombian province
of Panama, President Theodore Roosevelt
backed Panama’s independence movement.
Panama declared its independence from
Colombia on Nov. 3, 1903, only to find
itself forced to sign a draconian treaty
with the United States that gave Washington
permanent rights to the canal and
sovereignty over an 8-kilometer (5-mile)
strip on either side, which opened a
prolonged struggle for its recovery.
After many fruitless diplomatic efforts, on
Sept. 7, 1977, the head of the Panamanian
government, Gen. Omar Torrijos, and U.S.
President Jimmy Carter signed a treaty for
the progressive handing over of the canal to
Panama, which also guaranteed free transit
and permanent neutrality.
The Panamanian government on Dec. 31, 1999,
assumed complete authority over this
strategic infrastructure, whose works the
United States had restarted in 1904, and
with the efforts of some 75,000 workers from
all over the world and an investment of $400
million, completed in 10 years.
Today, less than 10 years after recovering
the canal, Panama since 2007 has taken on a
project that needs total financing of some
$5.25 billion to expand the waterway so that
today’s larger vessels can sail through.
Designed in 1904 for ships with a 267-meter
(875-foot) length and 28-meter (92-foot)
beam, the canal is too small to handle the
“post-Panamax” ships that are three times as
big, making it necessary to expand by
building the new set of locks.
It is estimated that post-Panamax vessels
now represent close to a third of the volume
moved by the world’s container fleet, the
chief segment of the Panama Canal’s
business.
The new waterway, with a lock at either end
of the canal, with three levels each and a
system of lateral pools as reservoirs, will
raise vessels 26 meters (85 feet) – as high
as an eight-story building – in order to
sail across Lake Gatun in mid-isthmus before
descending to the sea at the other end of
the canal.
The Panama Canal Authority has established
economic incentives and sanctions in order
get construction finished as soon as
possible, with the goal of having the
expansion concluded by the centenary of the
canal’s opening, on Aug. 15, 2014. EFE |
