Panama Canal — The Expansion

Aqua Clara Locks after completion at the Atlantic Entrance of the Panama Canal

Since the opening of the Third set of Locks at the Atlantic and Pacific entrances of the Panama Canal, traffic has been running at 14,000 transits a year, a 7% increase compared to the final year before completion of the expansion. Here are a few facts and figures to put into scale the enormity and difficulty of the challenge in creating the third set of locks:

• The Canal was going to reach maximum capacity by 2012. Since the expansion, the maximum capacity has almost doubled, to 600million PCUMS tons per year
• The maximum water level of the artificial Gatun Lake has to be increased by 30cm, an overall increase of 31billion gallons of water
• The new locks have water reutilization basins incorporated into each chamber. These allow 60% of the water used in each cycle to be recovered and reused again. 52million gallons of water are used in each transit, meaning over 31million gallons are recycled every transit
• The original locks had the capacity for vessels carrying up to 5,000 TEUs. The new locks now have the capacity to accept vessels up to 14,000 TEUs
• The amount of material dredged to allow for the larger vessels to navigate the canal was 56.6million cubic metres. This is the equivalent of 23 Hoover Dams!
• The expansion allows for an extra 1,100 transits with the third set of locks
• The overall cost of the project was USD5.25billion

9 years of construction and 30,000 jobs created for the 2 new sets of locks. All the hard work in making the expansion a success has resulted in what has proven to be an incredible achievement of engineering, and will continue to be for years to come.

Louise Foley — Liability Underwriter at Markel International, at the construction site in 2015

For more visit the Markel website