A tropical welcome to all viewers! Today, we are going to discuss a man-made stretch of water that, after its launch, changed intercontinental travel and became so important that all vessels or ships built are built with it in mind. It is the Panama Canal, the longest man-made canal. This canal really changed the way the world operates, and since then, its importance has only grown.
The Panama Canal: A Shortcut to the West
World trade was, is, and will always be at the forefront of any country’s economy. As such, finding safer, easier and cheaper routes to transport goods has always been a priority for any nation.
The Panama Canal is one of the most important man-made waterways on Earth. It is an 82- km long, artificial waterway that connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and serves as a key trade channel for the entire world. It can also be considered one of the most difficult and ambitious engineering projects ever.
Before the Panama Canal, there were not too many options as far as travel routes between East and West. Trips lasted a long time and were dangerous and costly.
Before the canal was built, ships traveling from the East to the West coast of the American Continent had to make their way around the Cape Horn of Chile in South American, and this constituted a voyage 8,000 km longer than it now takes through the Panama Canal.
Earlier, the Silk Road in China, was considered one of the most important routes for the transport of goods all across Asia and Europe. But on the ocean, the Panama Canal is considered to be among the most travelled routes in the world, as it connects the countries in the Eastern Hemisphere to the countries in the Western Hemisphere by the shortest possible route. It has been responsible for almost 5% of the entire world’s trade since its opening and its value has only grown since.
History Of The Panama Canal
The history of the Panama Canal dates back to 1534 when the King of Spain decreed that a shorter route between Spain and Peru be found. So, the idea of the canal is almost 500 years old.
In 1855, the Isthmus of Panama had a working railroad that was built by Chinese and Irish laborers. It connected the Pacific coast of the country to the Atlantic coast, and it was controlled by the United States so they could facilitate their trade. But the idea of a canal was still farfetched.
Then, 26 years later, in 1881, the French, encouraged by their success in building the Suez Canal, decided to give this world another canal that joined the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean.
Ferdinand de Lesseps, a French diplomat who had supervised the Suez Canal project, gathered enough funds to start the Panama Canal project with the promise of bringing great profit to investors.
It was proposed that the canal be built in Nicaragua instead of Panama, but Ferdinand de Lesseps swayed the deciding committee to vote for Panama and began the project for a sea-level canal by employing Caribbean and Indian workers.
The ground in Panama had to be dug up to 109 meters deep at a width of 1207 meters and only with pickaxes, machetes and shovels. The region of Panama, which was then part of Colombia, was very difficult as it was dense rainforest with a variety of deadly animals and insects that carried even deadlier diseases like malaria and yellow fever. This made the excavation even more difficult and resulted in countless worker deaths. This proved to be a massive hindrance to the work, and after nine long years, the French project came to a halt. The famous Ferdinand de Lesseps had failed to finish the canal and lost the sum of $234,800,000 belonging to the eight thousand investors during that time.
Almost a decade later, the United States, under the leadership of Teddy Roosevelt, decided to take over the canal project, giving the American Navy better access to the Pacific Ocean and also establishing a faster and cheaper trade route for the country.
With support from the United States, Panama became independent from Columbia again and gave the United States the right to build and own the canal. Message me in the comment section if you want me to make more videos on the history of Panama. In 1902, the U.S. purchased the French assets in the canal zone for $40 million. The U.S. got to build the canal, and they hired U.S. Army engineers to make it happen. Again, the project officially started in 1904. Soon after work on the canal started, the chief engineer resigned after a year because there had been too many problems right in the beginning. It was hard to get the workforce because everyone was afraid of yellow fever and malaria, and the equipment needed immediate repairs otherwise the work could never have gotten done.
After a year, another chief engineer joined and solved the problem of labor by recruiting West Indian laborers. The American engineers took a different approach than the French and abandoned the idea of a sea-level canal like the Suez Canal.
So, after taking over the project in Panama, the Americans dropped the idea of making a sea-level canal and went with the lock system instead. To put to use the work of the French, the U.S. decided to transform the excavated area into a man-made lake, now known as Lake Gatun. This was done by creating a dam on the Chagres River.
They built an elevated canal with a series of locks. Instead of repairing the equipment, the new engineer ordered new equipment, which increased the speed of the project. He also applied new methods, such as using swinging-boom and adjusting train routes for the extraction of excavated material.
After five years of construction, the locks for the canal were built. The locks were forged in pairs, and each chamber was 110 feet wide and a thousand feet long. The locks were embedded with culverts that leveraged gravity to raise and lower water levels. This was all run on hydroelectricity produced by the dam at the Charges River.
In 1913, after nine years of construction, the canal was finally complete and open for business, but the grand opening ceremony was delayed due to World War I. The canal was open for commercial use in August 1914. At the time, it was the most expensive project that the U.S. government had taken on. It cost more than $350 million to complete. The canal proved to be a great help in WWII for U.S. military strategies.
How The Panama Canal Works
The canals on Lake Gatun from which the ships pass is not at sea level. So, to help the ships pass through, canal locks had to be built to make the ships rise to the level of the lake. Lake Gatun is an artificial lake that was made to reduce the excavation work required for the construction of the canal. It is 26 meters above sea level.
Cargo ships that weigh over thousands of tons on average have to be lifted up to the level of the lake, and then brought down again to sea level at the other end of the canal to complete the ocean-to-ocean transit.
So how exactly it works? A ship is pulled in from any side of the canal into the first lock with the help of tug trains from each side of the canal, and the downstream gate of the first lock closes. And then the water from the upstream gate flows into the lock to raise the water level of the first lock till it matches the level in the second lock. Then the gate opens, and the ship is pulled into the second lock by the tug trains. This process is repeated two more times before reaching the third lock, which has the same water level as that of the lake.
The size of these three locks decides whether a ship is able to pass through the canal or not. Most ships are built to the size of the locks to ensure that they can easily pass through the canal. So a ship has to be under 1050 feet or 320 meters long and 110 feet or 33.53 meters wide to be accepted into the canal for inter-oceanic transit.
The locks have been built in pairs so there are two transit lanes that can run simultaneously. And ships built to the dimension of these locks, called the Panamax, can easily transit through them.
Today, ships are being built much larger than at the time when the Panama Canal was built. To meet the demand for larger ships, Panama decided to enlarge the canal in a national referendum.
But the cost of making this inter-oceanic transit is quite high, so a lot of companies started looking at other options of transportation like railways and airways for smaller consignments. To overcome this issue, the country decided to expand the dimensions of the canal. This enabled bigger ships with heavier loads to enter and cross the canal, which made the canal a more cost-effective and convenient gateway for getting goods transported across the oceans.
This expansion was much needed, but it was not cheap. It cost over $5 billion USD and took almost an entire decade to finish. The expansion works on much more sophisticated technology than the previous locks. It also remodeled the way the vessels are made. Because of the new locks, new ships are made bigger to carry a greater number of cargo containers through the canal, and these ships are called New Panamax.
In 2008, fifteen years after the original canal was built by the U.S., began the construction of the new locks and the reservoir of the Panama Canal. The new locks have bigger dimensions’; they are 366 meters long and 51 meters wide. Thus, the new cargo vessels can be made into bigger sizes, and as such, can carry bigger loads. The new locks started commercial operation just four years ago in 2016. Since then, the capacity of the canal has increased drastically, bringing with it a lot of business to Panama.
There are twelve locks in total. A two-step flight at Miraflores, and a single flight at Pedro Miguel, lifts ships from the Pacific up to Gatun Lake; then a triple flight at Gatun lowers them to the Atlantic side. All three sets of locks are paired; that is, there are two parallel flights of locks at each of the three lock sites. This, in principle, allows ships to pass in opposite directions simultaneously; however, large ships cannot cross safely at speed in the Culebra Cut, so in practice, ships pass in one direction for a time, then in the other, using both “lanes” of the locks in one direction at a time.
Why Would It Be Difficult To Expand The Canal Any Further?
Developed nations are continuously trying to establish their dominance over the world with their trade, military, and politics. The fact that the Panama Canal is in the Western hemisphere gives it a huge advantage in the power and politics of western nations over nations in the Eastern hemisphere. To overcome such bias in power, China and its other supporters have started building ports in different regions of the Eastern hemisphere, creating a Maritime-Silk route. And this could mean reduced traffic in the Panama Canal.
To overcome these potential challenges, further expansion of the Panama Canal can be considered. But that also poses some major problems.
Increasing the size of the lake to accommodate more vessels would mean submerging more land in the water. This would mean the destruction of flora and fauna in the area. The expansion would require more reservoir and even larger sums of water to raise the ships to the level of the lake; that can only be fulfilled by constructing dams and that means even more large-scale destruction of lives and deforestation, which is an even deadlier issue than the one at hand.
A huge chunk of Panama’s land has already been used to make the existing lake; any further increase in the land would mean an even larger divide in the country.
Also, the country of Panama lies on a tectonic divide, and if the balance tips on the wrong side of the scale, who knows what calamity may befall the canal and the country.
Some Interesting Facts About The Panama Canal
Panama Canal charges $90 toll per 20’ container
LOWEST TOLL IN HISTORY was paid by Richard Halliburton swum the length of the Panama Canal and paying the lowest toll in its history—36 cents in 1928
HIGHEST TOLL IN HISTORY paid by the cruise ship Norwegian Pearl in 2010 – US$375,600.
The US paid Panama a one time sum of $10 million for the rights, as well as a yearly lease.
Over 25,000 people died building the Panama Canal, mostly from disease. Approximately 20,000 died when the French attempted to build the canal, and over 5,000 died when the Americans successfully built the canal.
Between 13,000 and 14,000 ships use the canal every year.
Boat traveling from New York to San Francisco saves almost 8,000 miles.
Cargo ship “SS Ancon” – first vessel to transit the Canal on August 15, 1914
Each door of the locks weights 750 tons