The Panama Canal connects two of the world’s biggest oceans
and it's suffering from a strange problem: it’s running out of water.
That’s a big deal, because billions of dollars of
global trade and almost half of US sea freight passes through here every year.
The lack of water is reducing the number of ships which can pass through each day,
and that’s creating an enormous traffic jam.
If you’re the unlucky captain of one of these ships you have three options:
take a very long detour, pay big bucks for priority passage, or join the back of the queue.
Any one you choose is going to push up the price of whatever you’re carrying.
But why is this happening?
The Panama canal is a triumph of engineering
which helped launch the US as a global power over a century ago.
But its ingenious design has also left it vulnerable to a very modern problem.
Climate change has been reducing the rainfall the
canal relies on for much of the last decade and it’s only getting worse.
A plan is in place which could fix the problem, but will it be completed before
the droughts derail the global supply chain and a huge part of Panama’s economy dries up?
This is the race to save the Panama Canal.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Panama Canal to the global supply
chain. Six percent of the world’s shipping passes
through this 82 kilometre passage and if you’re on the east coast of the US,
there’s a good chance that whatever you’re watching this on has sailed through it.
It’s so important that many container ships are
classified after what part of the canal they can fit through.
And by sneaking through here, they avoid a 20,000 kilometre trip around one of the
most dangerous stretches of water in the world.
Looking at it on a map, it seems perfectly logical to create a canal here,
but the ground conditions mean building it was anything but straight forward.
Its ingenious design was only arrived at after a disastrous failed attempt which claimed the lives
of tens of thousands of workers and destroyed the careers of two of France’s most famous engineers.
In 1869, Ferdinand de Lesseps completed work on the Suez Canal,
a huge achievement which made him a household name in France.
In 1880 he began work on his follow up act in Panama.
De Lesseps planned to dig a huge canal, just as he had done at Suez,
which would allow ships to travel through at sea level.
But Panama’s tropical jungle is a far cry from the Egyptian desert.
While the isthmus was chosen for its low elevation,
it’s still one of the hilliest areas of Central America.
Most of the soil in the canal zone is composed of soft, crumbly clay,
which becomes even more unstable when wet.
But, late in his career and riding on his earlier success, de Lesseps confidence had gotten the
better of him and he insisted on a sea level design, despite the clear problems it posed.
Sure enough the construction ran into problems almost immediately
with the excavation of this: the Culebra Cut.
De Lesseps wanted the canal to be as steep and narrow as possible, to keep work to a minimum.
But constant landslides required the team to keep widening the trench to create a more stable bank.
This is the Culebra Cut when it was eventually abandoned in 1889
and this is how it appeared after it was successfully completed in 1914.
To make matters worse, the wet conditions destroyed the
primitive steam shovels by causing them to rust.
But worst of all were the tropical diseases which
tore through the workforce killing labourers and chief engineers alike.
The excavation of this short stretch of the canal was such a disaster,
it swallowed up USD $280M, bankrupted the project and cost the lives of 22,000 people.
This caused such a scandal back in France that de Lesseps and other engineers including Gustave
Eiffel – yes, that Eiffel – were all put on trial, fined and even ordered to serve jail time.
The canal was abandoned until 1904 when the project was picked up again by an
American expedition and this is what they built.
To avoid the seemingly impossible task of digging through unsuitable soil,
the US came up with the ingenious idea of raising the canal over land.
Three sets of locks were constructed at either end of the isthmus, which raises
ships 26 metres above sea level. In between this, the Culebra cut was finally completed,
and a dam was constructed across the Chagres river, creating a huge artificial lake.
Using new machinery and taking advantage of modern breakthroughs in tropical medicine,
the canal was completed in ten years.
It was seen as an incredible triumph for an emerging world
power. Not only did it create a new shipping route across a continent,
it also contained the largest dam and artificial lake in the world.
Since its opening, the canal has been crucial to global trade. And in 2010,
the one millionth ship passed through its locks.
But since then, the canal has hit some problems. A massive drought caused the authorities to
declare a state of emergency and limit the size of ships allowed to pass through it.
The ingenious design which bypassed the soft terrain has also become the canal’s achilles heel.
It takes nearly 200 million litres of water to pass a ship through one of the locks. The
newest set of locks are able to recapture up to 60 percent of that but the canal
mainly relies on the rainy season between May and December to top up water levels.
But in 2015 the rainy season was the driest in over a century. That was
caused by El Niño, a weather phenomenon which affects Central and South America,
causing rain in some areas and droughts in others. El Niños occur every few years, but climatologists
claimed this one was particularly bad because of climate change and warned
they would become more frequent and more severe in future … and that’s exactly what happened.
2023 saw the longest prolonged dry spell in the canal’s history
Up to 40 ships are capable of crossing the passage every day, but in November
last year that number was slashed to 24 and by February it’s likely to be reduced even more.
That’s leading to a massive traffic jam,
last August there were 160 ships queueing to pass through the canal.
And those that are passing through aren’t sailing
at full capacity. The largest class of ships, the neopanamax containers,
are carrying 40 percent less cargo so they sit higher in the shallow water.
While most passages are booked in advance,
the canal authorities reserve some slots which are auctioned off to the highest bidder.
In November last year a tanker carrying liquefied natural gas paid nearly four
million dollars on top of the usual USD $400,000 sailing fee to skip the queue.
So what are engineers doing to get the canal back to capacity?
In September last year, the Canal Authorities gave their backing to
a plan to create a new reservoir for the canal.
The scheme was first devised in the late nineties and involves
creating an artificial lake by damming the Indio river. Fresh
water would then be supplied to Lake Gatun by an eight kilometre tunnel.
But it’s not done yet.
A 2006 law which allowed the expansion of the canal’s locks
banned the canal’s authority from constructing any more reservoirs.
For the Indio river plan to go ahead that law would have to be overturned,
and that won’t happen without a fight.
… demonstrators opposing a controversial mining contract given to a Canadian company
that critics say could put Panama’s environment and water supply at risk…
These protests have rocked Panama for months and
any new reservoir is certain to be met with similar opposition.
While Panama struggles to come up with solutions, elsewhere long forgotten
schemes that could bypass the canal entirely are attracting attention.
In May, Nicaragua’s Foreign Minister,
talked up the possibility of a partnership with Belarus to build a canal across his country.
This route was originally looked at by the US in
the 1900s but abandoned in favour of the shorter option in Panama.
In 2022, Florida based company Zergratran launched an attempt
to build a 130 kilometre long tunnel in neighbouring Colombia which would
transport shipping containers coast to coast on maglev trains in just 30 minutes.
But the strongest challenger for the canal’s crown is Mexico's Interoceanic Corridor,
which is already under construction.
When completed, it will ferry freight and passengers 300 kilometres via road and rail links.
Just like the Nicaraguan canal, this isn’t exactly new either.
A railway first opened here in 1907,
but was run out of business when the Panama canal opened seven years later.
When freight services began again in September 2023,
it was hoped they would have the upper hand this time around.
It will be years until we can say for certain what will happen to the canal,
or trade in this part of the world.
Whether the Panama canal retains its dominance in the global supply chain,
or just becomes one of many options remains to be seen.
But if that does come to pass, then the golden age of one of
the greatest engineering projects in the world will be firmly in the past.
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