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The
Panama canal is shoring up its position with a
£5.25bn expansion hailed as the greatest advance
of the century in shipping.
Ninety-five years since the USS Ancon became the
first steamship to make the 50-mile passage in
August 1914, the project to widen the canal has
become essential to keep trade flowing through
the waterway.
It will increase the cargo capacity of the
Panamanian route to roughly 600m tons a year,
compared 309.6 million tons in 2008. British
shipping experts have praised the development as
a “major advance”.
“This
project is absolutely massive,” said Mark Page
of Drewry Shipping Consultants in London. “It
will be the biggest infrastructure development
that the world has seen since the Panama canal
was originally built, and it will have the
greatest impact of in terms of the routing of
trade by the sea that we have seen in the past
hundred years.”
But
some gave warning that rising toll prices
designed to cover the cost of the project could
deter British companies from using the route.
The expansion, which needs 5,000 workers, is due
for completion in 2014 to coincide with the
100th anniversary of the original development –
a gargantuan feat of engineering which cost more
than £600m and claimed the lives of 25,000
workers over 10 years.
A
consortium led by Impreglio, an Italian company,
and Sacyr Vallehermoso, which is Spanish, has
been awarded a $3.13bn contract to build two new
sets of locks on the Pacific and Atlantic sides
of the Canal.
The
new locks will be 1,400ft long and 180ft wide to
allow greater capacity than the current set,
which are just 1,050 in length and 110ft across.
New
catch basins will recycle 60 per cent of the
water used to fill the locks, in an attempt to
improve the environmental credentials of the
current system, which flushes it all out to sea.
The
waterway moves around five per cent of the
world’s cargo, including much of the meat, fruit
and vegetables stocked in British supermarkets,
and relies mainly on container traffic between
Asia and the US eastern seaboard. In 2008, 3,971
ships passed along the route.
But a
new generation of “super-containers” have
outgrown the canal, storing 14,500 20-foot
equivalent units (TFUs) as opposed to the 5,000
contained in the vessels of 1914. Growing
traffic levels have left the ships that are
still able to fit through the locks queuing to
cross from either side, with some ship owners
paying large sums to skip the traffic.
The
US cruise ship Disney Magic paid a record
$331,200 to jump the queue last year. Anxious
not to lose traffic to the Suez Canal and US
railways that transport containers coast to
coast, the Panama Canal Authority (PCA) is
borrowing $2.3bn to fund the project.
In a
further attempt to drum up capital, toll charges
on seven of the ten types of vessel that pass
along the canal have risen between 6.5 and 14
per cent since last May, while charges based on
displacement tons have increased 9 per cent.
Edmund Brookes of the British Chamber of
Shipping raised fears that toll increases could
deter British companies from using the canal.
“We welcome the fact that British companies will
be able to take larger containers through the
canal, but our concern is that this has to be
funded somehow,” he said. “The result is that
canal tolls have gone up and there have been
squeals about those increases. We want
reasonable tolls to make it worthwhile to use
the canal, otherwise people may find alternative
routes,” he said.
Work on the development has already begun.
Hillsides have been blown up to make way for a
four-mile access channel on the Pacific side,
which will permit the passage of vessels three
times heavier than the current limit.
Celebrating the 95th anniversary of the first
voyage along the canal on Friday, Alberto Aleman
Zubieta, the chief executive of the PCA, said:
“The Canal has been an important part of the
evolution of transportation as a vehicle for
bringing together nations around the world.
“Similarly, it has contributed to various orders
of human progress and scientific advancements
such as engineering, dredging, hydraulics, and
especially the successful management of natural
resources.”
Source: Telegraph
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