For Bigger Container Ships Full Of Useless Junk

Panama begins 5.25 billion dollar canal expansion

Sep 3 03:41 PM US/Eastern
Construction got underway Monday on a 5.25 billion dollar project to modernize and expand the Panama Canal, considered one of the world's engineering wonders.
The project will double the capacity of the 50-mile (80-kilometer) canal, built between 1904-1914 by the United States, which handed control of the waterway to Panama in December 1999.
Panamanian President Martin Torrijos on Monday hosted former US president Jimmy Carter at a ceremony marking the start of the expansion, which is expected to take about 10 years to complete.
Also attending the ceremony were Jose Miguel Insulza, Secretary General of the Organization of American States, Salvadoran President Elias Saca and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.
The project, which will build a third set of locks on the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the waterway, will ensure that today's supersized container ships, cruise liners and tankers -- many of which are too wide for the canal's present dimensions -- will be able to navigate the waterway in the future.
Currently the largest ships that cross the canal can only carry up to 5,000 containers, but in the future supertankers and largo ships carrying lugging as many as 12,000 containers will be able to navigate it.
Monday's ceremony falls on the on the 30th anniversary of the 1997 signing of an agreement between US then-US president Carter and Panama's head of government, General Omar Torrijos -- the current president's father -- that put the canal under Panamanian control.
Schools and government offices will be closed Monday, as Torrijos has urged Panamanians to participate in the public events marking the day.
Some 14,000 ships, comprising about five percent of annual world commerce, passes through the Central American shortcut between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans -- thereby avoiding the arduous and costly journey around South America.
About 80 percent of the gross domestic product of Panama, a country with a population of three million, is linked to canal activity.
The waterway's main users are the United States, China and Japan.
The third lane, parallel to the existing two, would accommodate massive vessels 366 meters (1,200 feet) in length, 49 meters (160 feet) wide and with a 15-meter (50-foot) draft.
Today, the so-called post-Panamax ships -- too wide and too long for the Panama Canal -- must circle Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America to pass between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans.
The government says work would be financed by a hike in tolls, worth 1.2 billion dollars in 2005.
Panamanian authorities say the project will directly generate 7,000 jobs, and indirectly 35,000.