CAREEROUTLOOK |
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which built the canal at the turn of the 20th century, actu- ally began developing ways to enlarge the canal just before World War II. With clouds gathering for the coming global storm, top U.S. com- manders wanted a way to move their biggest combatants—aircraft carriers and battle- ships—rapidly between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
at a business briefing held at Hotel Riu in downtown Panama City just before Cosco Shipping Panama steamed westward from the Caribbean to the Cocoli Locks, made his astonishing statement that two out of every three ships that transit the Panama Canal are either headed to U.S. ports—from all 1,700 or so ports in some 160 countries—or headed out from U.S. ports.
As stated above, today the Panama Canal’s aging locks are too small for the large container ships and bulk liquids carriers that bring today’s shippers economies of scale, cutting fuel costs, personnel costs, and the time it takes to get goods to market. By 1995 studies by the Army Corps of Engineers and Panama’s own Blue Ribbon Engineering Commission had established that far too many of today’s larger vessels, especially those carrying manufactured goods from Asia, were able to dock only at Long Beach, CA, to offload cargoes for rail shipment to eastern states.
Shipper’s Choice: Bigger Is Better Now, as Canal Authority chief Jorge Luis
32 HISPANIC ENGINEER & Information Technology | FALL 2016
Quijano says, with the deepening of the canal to 60 feet in the new shipping channels to the Culebra Cut through a mountain range in the Isthmus’ middle, an earlier widening of the Cut itself for two- way traffic, and the installation of Cocoli Locks and their Aqua Clara siblings at the canal’s eastern end, some 95 to 98 percent of the world’s biggest cargo carriers will be able to scoot through the expanded canal to head for the East Coast ports of their shippers’ choice.
Not all of those Eastern port areas are completely ready yet of course.
• The Port of New York and New Jersey, the biggest, is deepening the Hudson River from 45 to 50 feet and working to raise the deck of the Bayonne Bridge, which carries highway traffic to New Jersey, 64 feet by next year to let the biggest Neo- Panamax vessels slip safely beneath its heavy steel trusses.
• The Port of Philadelphia, 90 miles south, is finishing the dredging of the Delaware
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