Thursday, 18 January 2007
Big Issues for the Panama Canal
Preparing for the future can be difficult as the engineering needs of future generations are hard to visualize today. I encountered yet another example of this during my recent trip to Panama where the Panama Canal, an engineered system from the early 1900s, is finding it hard to service an ever-changing and expanding shipping world where international commerce is growing and the means for transporting goods is changing with it.
I serve the Panama Canal Authority (APC) as a member of its Geotechnical Advisory Board (GAB) and I had the opportunity earlier this month to meet with some of APC's engineers and scientists and learn more about the current issues faced by the Republic of Panama given the canal's present size and configuration. That is not to say that the canal is completely out-dated by any stretch of the imagination, but industrial ships are just getting too big for the canal and its locks! This produces engineering and financial challenges for Panama that will ultimately affect the country's role in international trade and commerce. The existing locks were sized and designed to carry our Navy's largest destroyers and battleships during the WWI period. The largest ship that can currently pass through the canal is called a Panamax. To give you an idea of its size, I'm told it takes a 15 km-long train to carry the number of containers a Panamax can carry. Now that's what I call a mighty big ship! Currently, a Panamax can fill the existing locks with about 1 foot to spare on all sides. The proposed solution to this problem is to expand the canal; including building new locks on the Atlantic and Pacific sides and increasing the width and depth of the Gaillard Cut. This expansion will give ships (called Post-Panamax) that are currently too large to pass through the canal, the ability to do so.
So how do we retrofit current civil engineering infrastructure that was efficient in the past but may not be relevant to future engineering and business practices? While the people of Panama are moving forward with an engineering solution for their particular problem, it is likely this is just one of many challenges our future world will face. What do you feel are some of the largest engineering challenges that civil engineers will face in the future? How can present-day technology and solutions enhance and fix our many structures of the past?