Raising the Steel Arches
As the world’s bridges scramble to raise themselves, Panama’s Bridge of the Americas stands tall
Marketplace’s Justin Ho traveled to Panama recently to report on the Panama Canal’s expansion. He explains how the construction of bridges have played, and will play, a crucial role in the shipping industry.
Just days before last Sunday’s opening ceremony, Ilya Espino de Marotta, the Panama Canal expansion project’s executive vice president for engineering, drove me through the construction site of the new, wider sets of locks near the canal’s southern entrance. Ditches and fencing blocked paths she said she’d used the day before. Two workers, seeing Marotta approach in her black SUV, scrambled to raise a cherry picker they had lowered across a dirt road.
The site sits two and a half miles north of the Bridge of the Americas — a steel arch bridge spanning the Panama Canal’s Pacific entrance. One of only two roadways that connect the upper Americas to the South American continent, it’s the first and final gateway for modern, so-called Neo-Panamax vessels that, starting this week, can use the canal’s new locks to pass between the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea — looping Panama in to the current era of global trade.
Viewed from the construction site, which required 150 million cubic meters of dredging and dry excavation, 4.4 million cubic meters of concrete and $5.4 billion, the bridge came across as the Panama Canal Authority’s greatest victory. It required nothing: no height-raising projects, no construction delays, no union negotiations. Completed in 1962, the bridge’s 201-foot clearance greatest asset in an era when other ports are scrambling to accommodate the larger ships that the widened Panama Canal was built for.
It’s somewhat ironic, then, that the success of Panama’s widened canal depends on whether other ports around the world spend billions to upgrade their own bridges, many that look just like the Bridge of the Americas. If a Neo-Panamax vessel tried to offload cargo at the Port of New York and New Jersey, the ship’s control tower would collide with the bottom of the Bayonne Bridge, another steel-arch bridge spanning the Kill Van Kull waterway between New Jersey and Staten Island.
Across the U.S., that same ship would meet a similar fate at the steel-arch Gerald Desmond Bridge in the busy Port of Long Beach, slamming into drivers traversing the roadway like a train lodging itself underneath a shallow tunnel.
To help prevent such catastrophe, Marotta told me the Panama Canal Authority sent memos to American ports with notes on the Neo-Panamax standard — things like width, depth, and height limits. With the upgraded Panama Canal now open, the pressure’s on for ports on the Gulf Coast and the eastern seaboard to finish their upgrades to let these bigger ships actually dock and unload cargo.
Those ports are hungry for the business. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is spending $1.3 billion to raise the height of the Bayonne Bridge to let wider, taller vessels pass underneath by late 2017.
Panama’s feeling the pressure, too. The Panama Canal has long competed with West Coast ports, since shipping companies can choose to dock at a port like the Port of Los Angeles and transfer cargo eastward via trains or trucks, bypassing the Panama Canal altogether. And because global trade isn’t the booming business it once was, Panama is counting on shippers to use its new canal in order to stay relevant. “For us, it’s important to have better and larger ports on the US East Coast, so they can accommodate the larger ships and have more space,” Ivan Zarak, Panama’s vice minister of the economy, told us.
Those West Coast ports are just as hungry for the bigger vessel traffic and the tolls that come with it. The Gerald Desmond Bridge in Long Beach, practically a mirror image of the Bridge of the Americas, has virtually the same clearance as the Bayonne Bridge. The bridge will be demolished, and a new, cable-stayed bridge with a higher roadway is constructed to let Neo-Panamax ships pass underneath. Engineers hope to finish the project by mid-2018.
This isn’t the first time fates of the Panama Canal and the Port of New York and New Jersey intertwined. George Washington Goethals, a civil engineer and U.S. army officer born in Brooklyn, New York, supervised the construction of the original Panama Canal. A memorial to the engineer stands at the foot of the Panama Canal Authority’s administration building.
Back in New York, a bridge named in his honor stands just three miles west of the Bayonne Bridge (Goethals also consulted for the former New York Port Authority). The Goethals Bridge opened just 14 years after the original Panama Canal’s completion, and like the original canal, has since been declared functionally obsolete. Its replacement will, like the new canal, create wider lanes. Its cable-stayed design will look awfully similar to the new Gerald Desmond Bridge. The project, officials say, should be completed by late 2018.
Marketplace’s Last Ditch Effort series looks at the future of trade, inequality and transparency as the new Panama Canal opens.
