Why the Panama Canal is Dying
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 พ.ค. 2024
- It's a long queue that could have repercussions on our daily lives. For the past few weeks, hundreds of container ships have been clogging up in front of one of the essential links in international trade. The Panama Canal, a gigantic corridor some 80 kilometers long, has been taken over by merchant ships. They are all waiting to cross this 100-year-old passage linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Some 14,000 ships use it every year, accounting for 6% of the world's merchandise flow. A vital link in the supply chain to stores all over the world, but one that's set to continue...
Technical failure, lack of space, climate issues... why is this marvel of engineering, with its eventful history, now under threat? Back in 2006, the queues in Panama were already making headlines. The canal had become too dilapidated, too small to accommodate the new container ships, ever larger, ever wider and ever bigger. After a referendum vote, the country embarked on a 6 billion euro expansion of the canal. In 2016, the new canal opened its locks and was able to accommodate 95% of the world's ships. Lake Gatun has also been transformed. Its bed was deepened by 45 cm. This work was intended to allow more boats to pass through every day.
Despite expectations, this pharaonic project has not solved the water shortage problem. In the face of drought, Panama seems helpless. For the time being, the first response has been to confirm the restrictions on passages for the coming year, if the rains are not sufficient until November, the end of the country's rainy season.
The authorities are aware that action needs to be taken: "From the point of view of the volume of water required by the Panama Canal, another source of supply is necessary", said Canal Administrator Ricaurte Vásquez in mid-September.
At a press conference, he unveiled an outline of the solution. The creation of a new water reservoir to the west of the canal. This would be made up of water from the Indio River. This reservoir would feed the main artificial lake, Lake Gatún, via an 8-kilometre underground water pipeline. This new source of supply will have to be built up first, and this is likely to take some time. According to estimates, it will take around three months if rainfall is abundant, and almost 2.5 years if drought persists. Another potential project announced by the company involves extracting the precious liquid from Lake Bayano, located to the west of the Canal, and then pouring it into the sea passage. These new developments still need to be consolidated, approved and financed before they can see the light of day.
In its latest press release at the time of this video's release, the company managing the canal announced that the situation was improving, with boats waiting less than they did a month or two ago. Nevertheless, the level of Lake Gatún remains dramatically low, more than 2 meters below seasonal norms. This proves that the problem remains unresolved.
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#construction #panamacanal
00:00 Traffic jams in front of the Panama Canal
00:50 Ferdinand de Lesseps' failure to build the Panama Canal
03:24 American takeover of the project
04:34 The calibration of locks and the birth of Panamaxes
05:13 The return of the Canal to Panama
05:30 The Canal: Panama's economic lung
06:15 How the Panama Canal works
06:59 Drought threatens the canal
08:26 Expansion of the Panama Canal
10:42 Proposed projects to counter the effects of global warming
2023 Looking 4 (En) | All rights reserved.
We lived in Panama City for several years, until about five years ago. I met the principal engineer on the project to build the larger locks needed for the VLCs (Very Large Container) ships to pass. According to this man, an Italian, "It was not going well." Leaks, improper design of the lock doors themselves, and a host of other problems could be traced back to a legal requirement to use primarily Panamanian designs and engineers. Compounding this has been the Canal Authority jacking up passage rates to extortionate levels. Sadly, very little of this massive revenue benefits the average Panamanian. Regardless of what the weather does, mismanagement and corruption paint a troubled future for this wonder of the world.
GLOBALIST corporate mismangement... all to destabilise human society. They don't call it "the great reset" for nothing !!!!
If it sounds jingoistic tough. Why am I surprised. The Canal was started by the French and finished by the US. It was an era of imperialism (1) and that's just the way it was. The civil and I assume Army Corps of Engineers were not idiots. They knew at the time the annual rainfall. They knew the volume of the locks. They knew the displacement of the primary ships the canal was meant for. While the Canal would certainly be used by commercial traffic in peacetime. The US built the Canal as a strategic asset to allow rapid transfer of naval power from one coast to the other. The voyage of USS Oregon from the West Coast to Cuba during the Spanish-American War is often given as an inspiration in popular history.
When the US built the Canal the engineers knew how much water was needed to operate the Canal. And how much traffic it could handle without issues. The expansion to handle larger container ships means not only larger locks but increased capacity needed in the holding reseviors. While when a ship enters a lock From Gatun Lake it will displace some of that water back into the lake it isn't much. To raise ships in the locks it is easy to release water into the lock from the lake. Lowering ships requires either pumping or release. Releasing means the water is eventually lost to the system.
If the region is seeing reduced rainfall is that part of the effects of Climate Change. Or is it from the onset of a long period of drought. Data from sediment records show that there have been periods of extended droughts in the region.
1) One could say that Imperialism is alive and well today given China's policy of loans to developing countries. And in the second half of the 19th Century it was just considered "normal" amongst world powers.
@@mpetersen6if Panama had waited for their own engineers Tod develop the Canal, it would be at least 200 years late. Foreign engineers are the reason why it it was built at all.
@@mpetersen6 please break your text into paragraphs , will you ? It has merits on factual content, but it is unreadable.
Jimmy Carter should never have given the Canal to the Panamanian government. They didn’t even want it.
My Grandfather was there & worked on building the canal. He was an electrical engineer. I still have coins from Panama, from that time. He was a good man.
Bless him!
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 Nice of you on sharing with us. Keep his memory alive.
Bless you and your family ❤
Blessed are those who keep the canal up and running on a daily basis, to keep the goods rolling from one side to the other. Without their dedication and hard work, we'd be SOL.
@@rboettger😊❤️l❤ñ
GOD has said that NONE of us are good!!
I was a senior in Balboa High School in 1979, when Carter presided over giving the canal to Panama. Very exciting times! Went through the canal a couple times on military ships, and water skied in Lake Gatun almost every weekend. I lived in the city of Panama and have tremendously fond memories of the Panamanian people and the city.
something for your bucket list I think .
So the problem is the older locks are ejecting the water down stream using gravity to run the locks. The newer locks recycle the water into holding ponds and is reliant on electric pumps. If they stop down stream injection and started a desalination pumping program, they could keep the lake level artificial in which they are only fighting evaporation.
The video seems to disregard this. Recycling water was the obvious answer
It requires a lot of electric power, i know about hydraulics , but they not gonna put that until summoned to greater scarcity.
My grandfather started working in the Canal Zone in 1934 as a mule driver. He worked his way up to Master of the Locks at Pedro Miguel, Balboa and Mira Flores. When she was a child, my mom discovered a German spy taking pictures of ships moving through the locks. He was arrested trying to escape! I lived there until kindergarten when we took a ship back to the states. A great experience.
I too lived in Panama in the days of the former Canal Zone (my parents were MDs in the MARU research unit next to Gorgas hospital). We lived in Cardenas village, not far from Miraflores locks. I was a child then, and studied at Balboa Elementary. Great memories, I loved everything about living in Panama.
It seems that when the Americans ran it things ran well.
@@HectorGonzalez-fz6ws Climate change is not something easy to control.
Awesome story about your mother
@@dittohead7044 yes, after she saw him in the banks near the canal, she ran to the base and told the sgt. on duty. They put her in a Jeep with a gun mounted on the back, and a bunch of soldiers and raced over to where she saw him. When they found the spy he opened the camera to expose the film which helped prove his guilt.
The small locos do NOT pull the ship. The ships move forward under their own power. The locos only steer the ships (their purpose is to keep the boats from hitting the walls of the locks). 😉
That seemed obvious. What surprised me was the lochs using inland water to flood them.
@@jonathanweir6084 It seemed obvious to me that the system was designed to maximize the use of gravity. I guess we all need to help each other out with our blind spots. 😉
@@jonathanweir6084 😊Apparently, it wasn’t so obvious to the makers of the video. 😊✌️
stop lying nobody cares
Total elevation in the canal is 26 metres (83.3'). Use salt water in the locks and it fills the canal, next seeps into the surrounding soil. Not a good plan.
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Incredible report, extremely interesting. Thank you for sharing it with us. The grim story though about its problems, compounded by extortion, does not look good on the canal future. I hope they can solve their issues and not become too greedy by overcharging the passing ships in the area.
Seeing those container ships makes me think we really should be making things ourselves again.
agree. making useless cheap trash on the other side of the planet is stupid.
Why uselessly make all things yourselves when someone else can do it better and cheaper? Pure pride. Better to make useless cheap trash in another country than make useless expensive trash at home and save shipping costs. All is just a reflection of what businesses and costumers want
@@jarigustafsson7620China makes the best stuff
We get what we can afford
Absolutely right. These ships are too big. Global trade and consumerism is out of control.
The question is do we really need to buy some of the things we 'thought' we want? Or new clothes every 2 weeks? Regardless of where they were made...
My Grandfather disappeared when he was 14. One year later, his "adoptive" parents received a telegram that he was on a hospital ship coming back from Panama with malaria. Lying about his age, he joined the army at 14 to help build the canal.
I feel sorry for him.
Edit: Nobody should join the army, look what it got him.
@@dukeofthedance8062 Now for the rest of the story.....the reason I put "adoptive" in quotes was because he was actually sold to a farmer when he was 7, not allowed to go to school during the growing season because he had to work 16 hours a day.
And Jimmy Carter just gave it away!! After so many people lost their lives trying to build it 🤦♂️
@@sittingindetroit9204 No wonder he joined, am sorry to hear he had to go through that. I wonder why he didn't strangelle his captors though, revenge is a powerful motivator. Maybe he did before leaving. I wouldn't blame him.
@@dukeofthedance8062 He didn't. He and his brother were 6 and 7 when sold. His family was very poor and there were 11 kids. I think this happened(s) more than anyone realizes, they just call it "trafficking" now.
As a teen I visited Panama in 1986 and did a ride-along transit on a Chinese Freighter. It costs them $100,000 all in advance and they gave us copies of the docs as souvenirs. At that time U.S. military bases and Canal Zone offices were slowly being handed over. As we drove by them the once pristine buildings and hangars and buildings would be covered in vines and rusting away. Restaurants in city had guards with machine guns. We took the Pan Canal Train and traveled from Caribbean to Pacific in just hours. (I was visiting a friend whose father was a US Army Officer). Amazing experience.
Me, my wife and two small kids were stationed there from 67-70. Lived downtown for first year or so before moving to another Panamanian town, Arraijan. No water there until about 2:00 each afternoon and mud came out of the taps for 10 or so minutes. Needless to say we boiled everything. There were lots more issues.
This is simply not born out by the data. Accessing public data of annual rainfall in Panama since 1901 to 2021 (the latest date I could find) show no decrease in rainfall over that time. In fact the trend line is very slightly positive with a slope of .04 and an R squared value of .015. The period mentioned in 2016 and 2019 is no different than other periods of a few years of rainfall below the trend line followed by a few years of rainfall above the trend line. In fact every year since 2017 to 2021 has had rainfall above the trend line. The year of lowest rainfall during that period was 1958 while the year of greatest rainfall was 1975. From 1999 there has been 13 years of rainfall greater than the trend line and 9 years of rainfall below the trend line all in a fairly narrow range. So the gratuitous reference to global warming and reduced rainfall is simply factually wrong based on the published data. A far more likely explanation lies in the fact that there are many ships lined up to use the canal. Again data show that the total tonnage transiting the canal has risen sharply since the 1950s and dramatically since 2017 (approximately 34%) while the number of ships has remained roughly constant since the early 80s meaning much larger ships transiting the canal. As noted in the video those ships require much more water to float them and thus expel much more water into the sea. The canal experienced a recent drought that is not at all unusual from a historical standpoint. A longer period of years below trend line data occurred from 1944 to 1958. The data I am quoting are from reliable sites such as Statista, Port Economics, Management and Policy, and Extremeweatherwatch.com. This looks to be nothing but a fatuous attempt to throw a completely unwarranted reference to "global warming" into the video, either for political reasons or for click bait.
Update: Nick_R below made the unsupported statement that, "Except the World Bank data does show a rise in surface air temperature for Panama." And then proceeded to claim I am biased. In spite of my repeated requests as of this writing he has not posted the link to the data.I noted the data were not on the World Bank website. He failed to provide the link and in fact the temperature data for Panama are not on the main website but on a different website that is apparently affiliated with the World Bank or run by the World Bank. I was able to capture the data from their website (the downloadable files were corrupt). I analyzed the data from 1901 and sure enough there is NO increase in average mean annual temperature for Panama as reported in the World Bank data. The slope is 0.0045. Statistically zero. Additionally, the standard deviation for the data is only .3 degree Celsius. The website does not claim that the data show an increase in temperature (that would be false) it simply presents a very misleading graph that is apparently trying to show such an increase with colors. It should be noted that the data are presented to the nearest .01 degree. A level of precision not generally recognized as being available from temperature measuring stations. (The NIST website claims they are accurate to a "fraction of a degree" without being more specific.) Thus the data themselves are somewhat questionable. In any case, Nick_R is flat-out wrong.
Unusual drought or rainfall are today ALWAYS blamed on "global warming" or climate change. NEVER are such claims questioned by going back to the actual records. Thanks for pointing out the TRUTH. Also, the claim that Arctic ice is melting away is also a canard. The lowest extent occurred in 2012, and has never been reached since. It does appear that a cyclical phenomena that the ice recedes and then comes back.
Any time the weather deviates from the norm, some schmuck throws in a "because of global climate change" quip - whether that has anything to do with it or not. Usually not.
Climate change zealots care not about facts.
Nice research, it's a wonder your post has not been shadow banned / deleted by the climæte scaremongeres...
Very interesting.
Don't bother with the weather. The weather has done this ever since the canal has been formed. When you say that there's 14,000 ships a year using the Panama canal the volume of water that they are using for the locks for the transit is the reason why you do not have any water. Additionally you've increased the sizes of the ships by expanding the canal basin from what it was originally designed with the upgrade for the super Panama Max ships because of that you have a much higher volume of water being used. This isn't about climate change this is about the sheer number of increases in ships using the Panama canal.
@@LordOfLight 100% is is stupid. You have more ships going thru. Which they said dumps their freash water into the Ocean. Doing this Daily! On top of that they made the Canal Bigger. Dumping even more water out. Try it at home. Take a Tea Spoon and start empting your bathtube. Time how long that takes. Than use a Bucket! Time that time. compare the Two. You will notice a huge difference how fast your run out of water in less time. It is that simple!
@@LordOfLightno, they think everyone else is.
If the canal had stayed the size it was this wouldn’t be happening.
You can’t blame “climate change” when droughts have always happened yet they continue to dump twice as much fresh water with every passage.
The new locks actually use less water than the old ones (thanks to stoarge ponds next to the new locks) well allowing bigger ships to pass. Lots of videos explaining how this works. So bigger ships are not the problem.
Exxon designed another *daddy* to calm folks down. You
@@AdventuresonTour1:22
The abount of water being used and sent to the Oceans have increased significantly since the new Locks where opened which is the main reason which is not mentioned. The weather changes and we do go through dry and wet periods as it has been for decades.
You'd think solar and wind power pumps could be used to fill the locks with sea water to reduce the demand for fresh water?
In 2003 I took a trip to Vegas with my family and one of the things we did was tour the Hoover Dam. The structure itself and the amount of water it was holding back was mind-blowing to see in person, it had a regal feeling about it, you were proud just to be standing on it. In recent years I had heard how low the water level was so I went back to see for myself last year. Let me just say this, it was shocking, I couldn’t believe what I saw. It was as if I went to the wrong dam. Hopefully the water level has come back up but that day it was just plain old sad.
no man nothings wrong keep flying buying driving ... nothing wrong ..
Lake Mead has recovered a little bit, but not nearly as much as it has dropped.
I was in Las Vegas in 1985. Took a tour to Hoover Dam including a boat ride on the lake and a tour down inside the dam (which was still allowed back then). Lake looked a lot different at that time. So much lower now.
Was there in 1986, Meade was pretty full.
If you got over to the models they talked about how the river has a history of dams being put upstream to keep taking the water. Vegas and San Diego take a lot of that water.
I was stationed in Panama '83-'86. Loved every minute of it-it's a paradise. My buddies and I would ride up to contractor's hill and other places to watch the ships go through while sipping on a few cold ones. It was great fun to go jump into the water at the what was called the French Cut, where what was left of the French's attempt at building a canal. Tropical islands, great food, mostly friendly people, and big fun in Panama City. What a great way to live when only 18-21 years old.
It's definitely time to build another canal somewhere else as other commenters have noted. and stop overtaxing this old one.
😂😮😮😅
Where else is it feasible to build a canal?
I spent 5 years in the army at ft Sherman Panama from 80 til 85 when our unit was deactivated , I also love talking the family to toboga island and spend the day , I loved Panama with the short time I was there
@garycamera9955, alongside Route 66 of course. 😆
@@davidpipes5451 I was at Clayton about the same time. Taboga was great though that ferry ride was sketchy AF on Sundays with everyone trying to get back for work on Monday.
Solution to the problem, make the goods where they're needed. locally produced goods.
The big corporations want cheap labour, not local labour.
Yes
@@ngauruhoezodiac3143 ~ We all do. At least those of us with any sense. Cheap labor = cheaper products. We're already being crushed by Bidenflation.
Have you seen some of the videos of what low cost manufacturering for useless toys, gimmicks, and plastic crap looks like overseas? Good luck convincing wealthier nations populations to want to do such boring, monotonous work
Not all places have all the materials or products needed to produce what they need locally.
With global transport generally getting more and more difficult it is a great opportunity for countries to go back to making their own products at home and not outsourcing it. This creates a skilled labour force, makes the country more self sufficient, a better standard of living, does away with unemployment and protects against most of the global turmoil.
❤
My Daddy worked on the panama canal bridge. He brought back reel to reel home movies that were of coworkers on the bridge, falling into the huge nets hung underneath the bridge as it was being built.
It's crazy he caught that on tape. Nice to safety measures making a difference. Any time I see large construction projects going on I can't help but think back to those old b&w photos of the Empire State building construction where people are working hundreds of feet off the ground without harnesses or nets.
My Great Grandfather was commissioned by Roosevelt to help build the canal. He was an iron worker. He made machetes from the sunken french ships cables. They used those to cut through the vegetation.
That’s impressive
I'll bet he told you things that people never read in the newspapers!
An iron worker was personally hired by the President?
@@roberthanks1636
Where do you see "personally"??
Put the magnifying glass down, no inspection required here.
@@roberthanks1636 Commissioned just means Roosevelt personally signed the laws and bills making it possible to build the canal. That made it possible for his grandfather to be involved in the project.
Edit: I've had several friends working on various projects on a personal invitation. The signer of the invitation - guarantees you're welcome in the country and could be expecting help and safety as a foreigner as a guest. Accepting the invitation you're saying you'll accept a job as a guest - treating the people of the country with the same kind of respect as granted to you. The personal invitation can be signed by others acting on behalf of a government or a ruler. It's an agreement virtually as an agreement between two people. It's formal etiquette. It only becomes very personal not having respect.
I’ve been through the Panama Canal twice…..it’s an amazing place i suggest see it if you have the chance 👍
Such a nice telling voice :3
do you do other professional voice overs aswell?
I’ve been keeping a close eye on this subject. I work in maritime and know just how important the canal is for the global economy.
Thank you for sharing.
the global economy will adjust. It will also be slightly less efficient as lead times and costs increase. Some stuff is going to have to go over land. If I were an investor, I'd buy stock in US rail shipping that does coast to coast.
Oh, well pardon me.....
I've always wondered besides drought, that if the new locks are releasing more water than the canal was originally planned for.
I don't know the details, but the new locks have a water-saving feature of some kind. They exhaust teh locks into holding ponds and the water is somehow then reused. I think they used the exhaust from a down-bond ship to fill the lock for an up-bound ship. Or something like that.
Dumb me I thought all the water in the canal was from the oceans
It’s happening now. Pretty badly
Maybe releasing more water than rainfall can replenish. There are ports on either side and a rail link between so some goods would get through without using water.
Yeah it's almost like the people in 1900 didn't know math.
Why dont they pump sea water?
Is there a way to have two big pumping stations to pump water from both oceans into the canal instead of the lakes. One for the first half and other for the other half. Just an idea or is that impossible to do.
They had a $6 Billion expansion, making profits better but water loss worse. They could add a couple of hydro dams on the feed rivers, allowing more water to be stored in rainy times, and power to be generated, which could be used to simply pump water back up the locks. There's no shortage of water, and they are essentiially selling a couple of million gallons of catchment water for a fortune every time they pass a ship, and creating artificial scarcity is business 101.
Very good observation! I also wonder though if back in the day stainless steel maybe was difficult to utilize as an outer coating to the gates and the massive steel parts they probably already use in the locks. Using saltwater and corrosion being an immense problem so goes the loss by using precious freshwater.
I also wonder how advanced desalination techniques have become where they could use ocean water and desalinate it. Maybe even today that's not possible on that large of a scale unless they devise a means of recirculating the desalinated water. Maybe then another idea is if they can isolate the saltwater from contaminating the freshwater environs then that would solve the water volume problem but again there's the corrosion problem.
Maybe there is a means of neutralizing the saltwater but who knows maybe that would bring dangerous chemicals into the problem. I'm just adding now in after-thought on 10-22-23 about conservatively diluting the saltwater with freshwater to reduce the desalination load. Maybe they could utilize additional freshwater when there is like a major tropical storm surge before it all drains away into the ocean and as a closed system recirculate as much as possible.
All is easier said than done with my amateur view. I never imagined the cost of one ship going through the canal and wonder how soon with climate change they will start using the NW Passage. It must be very frustrating for shipping firms to have to wait so long in port where both the shippers and Panama lose. It's so amazing what the civil engineers have done at such an early era, and today as well. I just hope Panama preserves their own freshwater environs too and they find together with the expertise of scientists and engineers worldwide to achieve a balance. Such an endeavor would benefit the whole world instead of wasting money on wars.
The last lock always has to release fresh water into the sea @@mwj5368 but that was where it was going anyway. de-salination would be way too expensive, but using much less power, they could pump the last lock's fresh water back uphill, then fill the lock from the sea water ahead of it. You wouldn't get it all, and there would be some salt going up the locks, but not enough to cause serious damage, and none reaching the lakes. It would mean them spending money. Electricity to pump water for each ship, and extra time waiting in the last lock. It is a clear solution though, and they would probably just pass the costs to the customer, but this would be expensive to install, so it would be unpopular with the shareholders. They'd rather see the profits in their lifetimes, even if that means the lakes will run dry at some point in the distant future. The'll be invested in something else by then.
I don't think creating artificial scarcity makes sense in this case, first of all, they can basically charge whatever they want, as long as it's less then the amount of money that would be lost by going the long way around, and people will still pay it, and secondly, if the price to go thru the canal exceeds that cost, ships will just take the long way around. There's a set cost at which people will pay any thing up to, but not above, to use the canal.
That's all true @@t1m3f0x but who will be the first to say no, and lose the deal that day? As we saw with the example in the video, shipping companies are willing to pay up to $2.5 million for the premium service at peak times in the dry season. It's a bottleneck to world trade, and fixing the problem destroys the demand that creates. Going the long way round even if it's cheaper will still be less desirable from a business viewpoint because of the extra time it takes, and if time is money, it's a LOT of money to a massive ship that could be using that time to ship cargo somewhere else.
@@mwj5368stainless steel was expensive and hard to procure when the canal was first built
As a young sailor, I was stationed at NSGA Galeta Island on the Caribbean coast. I really loved my three years there. I enjoyed interacting with the Panamanian inhabitants, fishing in Lake Gatun and casting for snook as the canal locks opened. Since then I've transited the canal six times on Navy ships.
I was raised on the Atlantic Side (or Caribbean) and moved to the Pacific Side when I was 26. My years there were the best. Everything that you mentioned plus riding my Yamaha to Pina Beach, the ocean to ocean cayuco race, camping on the islands of Gatun Lake, and much more. It was a wonderful place; much better than the Pacific Side.
...great memories you have too . if some could only dream. great times I'll bet@@pdm2201
Was at Fort Kobe 3rd Battalion 508 Airborne. 1966. Red Devils unfortunately most of us went to Vietnam Nam Many are on the Wall in DC. Loved my time there
10:03 I feel very sad for that very sad polar bear.
It’s amazing to think this amazing project of engineering was done 120 years ago.
The men required to do the work required no longer exist.
@@kb9gkc unfortunately you are right. It’s amazing how tough, ambitious, and resilient men of the 19th and early 20th century were. They are probably rolling in their graves when they look at the state of their descendants. Smh.
And we can't build a good road in the States...go figure
It seems like people were more capable of getting shit done a century ago, then it is today, also, back then they did not have as many regulations, paperwork, inspections... like limits on environmental pollution, laws against child labor or other employment regulations, minimum wages laws, did you hear in the video he mentions 5000 men died building that shit
@Remas2007, the statement is "another 5000" (after the Americans took over the project), without having said that some 20,000 had already died under the French. That's a shocking 25,000 in total, which some claim to be a conservative estimate.
My in-laws and my husband and myself went on a Princess cruise to the Panama Canal. Our ship went into Gatun Lake and turned around. It was my father in law’s dream to go through the locks. It was an amazing experience. It is so sad that it isn’t being managed properly.
No surprise its failing when you allow a corrupt third world system to take over the management of something that actually needs maintaining lol
It's a great thing to see sailed through here in 2019
What part of climate change and the "El Nino" climate crisis is causing the Panama Canal not to be properly managed?
Panama (like Costa Rica) is one of the few countries with 100% clean energy compared to the US you are responsible for the the water problems in the Panama Canal and the current climate crisis around the World because of your consumerism culture... And don't let me start talking about China (where you outsource to fabricate everything from).
Stop Talking Nonsense!
It is being managed properly, I assure you. I live 2 Km away from the Canal and most of what this video and comments say are horseshit.
managed properly??
Might be time to reconsider an ocean level canal. Big advantage would be in saving transit time and could accommodate the largest ships.
Have you heard about the continental divides between Pacific and Atlantic ocean.
That is the problem that it needs locks. Do your research.
@@reynaldodizon6563 It's not a crazy idea to do it without locks and it is more possible than you give it credit for, even if it changes the elevation of water and even if there is bedrock to get through. It's a bit harsh to say, "do your research" when the same can be said about your response.
The issue is the complexity and difficulty building such a canal is probably 10-100x greater than a lock system, depending on how it is done and it might significantly increase the danger to ships traveling through. However, it might be the inevitable long term solution.
i was an officer in the canal zone in mid 90s. The opening line of the narrator i answered: Because Panamanians are running it
we just had an extended La Nina period. Now we are back in El Nino. I'm guessing the problem will be forgotten soon. It's not global boiling it's just natural weather cycles within weather cycles.
Yup. Its had rainfall issues ever since its completion over 100 years ago. Its irresponsible to make it seem like this is a new global warming issue.
Thanks very much for this excellent YT! I went through the Panama Canal on my 31' C&N sailboat with my wife & cat in 1978 on my way to Vancouver via the Marquesas, the Tuamotu, Tahiti, Hawaii. Did you noticed that the entrance to the canal on the Caribbean side is actually WEST of the exit on the Pacific side & therefore the entrance/exit on the Pacific side is EAST of the entrance/exit on the Caribbean side 😃😃😃
Facts, facts, facts....The Eiffel Tower was not designed or even conceived by Gustave Eiffel. He built it. The architect-engineer who designed the tower was a Swiss by the name of Maurice Koechlin...
Excellent video, nicely done. I'd be interested to find out the background piano music, it's simply outstanding.
The more tweeking and damage they do to the jungle and environment, the worse the problems. Imagine that.
That said, I'm just stunned by the amount of work that went into that immense project.
Digging in that heat, hacking down huge trees, the wet, hot climate, the bugs and snakes....such an overwhelming size to dig--and then even taking down a mountain!
OMG. Exhausts me to just even think of the work!
When you rearrange nature, it does have a bad affect on us. Oh dear . . .
It was the equivalent of the first moon landing, in terms of tech and labor!
Yellow fever.
Almost anything can be achieved if you throw enough money and manpower at it. It also helps if you don't care too much about the workers safety, pretty sure tons of people died building the canal like most old mega projects they probably have a few dozen bodies entombed in the concrete.
Yup. The forests drive local precipitation, kill the trees, kill the rains..
My brother was stationed at the canal zone during the Vietnam War. He was Army and the canal was what they protected
The Army had a jungle survival school there too. It might still be there
Of course, if the motivation is not greed, it's war, both prime examples of human stupidity.
So my sis-in-law joined my brother during his tour. And my nephew was born there. 2 years ago they all went back to "see" the place. Brother hired a driver and things changed so much, and was dangerous. Nephew enjoyed it , brother and sis-in-law was amazed and loved reminiscing. Nephew is USAF retired after 30 years. Flew F16, and commanded Kunsan AFB in Korea. I'm just the very proud aunt. And I would have loved to traveled with them to Panama. Love my family, but us siblings are on the old side now
Brother is 79 now...but a young 79. I'm a old broken fart at 69.
In 1933 my father was stationed At Cocosola Submarine Base in the Canal Zone in buildings looking like shipping containers on each side of the canal actually contains the Gears that operate the canal there is a cement walkway thru the center Whe dad was home on Sudan he would take me down there to see the big wheels go around half of the gear came almost to the roof the other was out of sight down in the pits
I was two years old but remember those Happy Excursions.
No WATER!!! This is very hard for me to understand … with the Atlantic on one side and the Pacific on the other 😳🤷🏻♂️😳
Beautiful presentation.
I had the opportunity to transit Panama Canal during my first voyage at sea in 1976 on a passage from New Orleans to Kobe,Japan
What a great doc! Thank you! Informative and enjoyable. Great VO actor.
A double or four track railway parallel to the canal purely to carry containers would assist a lot. The long term solution is to build a sea level canal across Central America.
if a sea level canal was easy, they would have done that 100 years ago
In a hundred years new stuff becomes a reality, but what country/ countries are you going to cut?
So you're proposing 2 deepwater ports costing hundreds of billions apiece, unloading 18,000 containers onto trains, then reloading them on the other side and doing this 40 times per day?
The loading/unloading would take so long it would be quicker to get to the USA east coast from China via the Suez Canal, never mind that you'd need 8-10 parallel tracks to both keep up and have enough reduncancy to be able to have track maintenance happening continually
A straight trench could never work since the sea level is ~50 feet higher on the Pacific side than on the Atlantic side.
9:55 .... So what I'm hearing is "Ah, for just one time, I would take the Northwest Passage. To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea. Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage. And make a Northwest Passage to the sea."
Very interesting and informative video - thanks
This is probably one of the reasons why a new canal is being considered along the Costa Rica, Nicaragua border.
would be a dry canal
Then they better make it salt water so it can be fed by the two oceans. That way drought wouldn't be a problem considering sea levels are slowly rising.
@@WolfHeathen Good point but would take huge energy volumes to move the seawater. Drive cost of passage up. Feasibility may be elusive.
That plan died years ago.
@@JR-mo8os
A seal level canal along the N/CR border would different than a canal crossing Lake Managua.
Interesting to me is that in the new largest locks with the reservoirs alongside them, they only reuse 60% of the water. I thought for a long time that they reused close to 100%. Definitely an issue to resolve. Is it feasible to use sea water to fill some of the locks? Yes it probably would take longer to fill the locks by pumping the water in from the ocean, but to me it seems that it would be a shorter time than sitting out in the ocean in a que and then possibly they can keep the lake/reservoir at its fullest level. Flushing the water out to sea is like flushing a toilet; you don't get that water back.
Reusing more would need huge electric pumps. Defeating the point of a gravity fed lock.
@@danielvanced5526 There's no "Defeat" in using electricity and seawater storage ponds next to the locks to conserve fresh water. Panama gets plenty of sun. They could probably easily set up solar power and large scale battery storage for the lock pumping without much trouble.
@@DMahalko There are probably some challenges we wouldn't know about outside of the huge amount of electricity needed. Some of the world's brightest are working on the problem, I'd hope that if it were that simple they would have done it by now.
@@DMahalkoPanamanians are often technologically illiterate and do not consider technological solutions, they are seen as insane
@@danielvanced5526 Maybe we are past the point of feasible use of 'gravity' flow, especially if you don't have any water to gravity flow.
Can't they create new/additional reservoirs and pump ocean water into them continuously?
My friend David Cisneros worked as engineer for 10 years but couldn’t stand the humidity
A 2019 study by the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) estimated that wind turbines could generate up to 1.5 gigawatts (GW) of electricity at the Panama Canal. This is enough electricity to power the canal's operations and to pump water back into Gatun Lake, the canal's main reservoir.
Exactly what I started thinking about, though with solar panels. Pumping water would be a million times better solution for every party involved.
Where would the water be pumped from? You can't pump it from the ocean if you wish to keep the lakes freshwater, which is necessary if they're being used to supply water to Panama.
@@ziggystardust4627 If they build a small pool where they raise the ships, they could pump the raised water to the pool, and with the next ship, fill the gates from that pool.
And when they lower the ships at the end of the canal, they should pump the water out from under the ships back to the lake instead of letting it out to the pacific.
Does this have any merit, or I do not understand something?
Reading up on it, this is perhaps somewhat similar how the new expansion works already. Someone with real proper knowledge could answer these questions.
@@Sonnell 0:05, they already have pools next to the gate(3 for each) that save most of the water from each passing compared to just letting all the water go(this is the way the newer locks save water despite being larger).
Not done with pumps but with gravity, if you want to know why then practical engineering has a video on it called "the surprising efficiency of canal locks, specifically using the Panama canal as an example.
The reason they don't use pumps being that it costs more to pump the water up from a single passing than the ships are willing to spend for passage.
You can use pumps to keep the lake topped up by just pumping water up from the lower locks, but then the canal is no longer economically beneficial to Panama as ships start sailing around south America instead of paying 1 million per passing.
Water is heavy and pumping it is expensive.
As some people have alluded to, the solution is to recycle the lock water. Using the water from the upper locks to fill the lower locks for going down is a given, but at this point it becomes necessary to pump the water back up hill for return traffic. It is not perfect, because it is less efficient from an energy point of view than letting gravity do it's thing. The return for using pumps is that the lakes are not depleted, as long as the elevation differences are not great, theses efficiency losses can be minimal.
I just did a back of the envelope calculation. About 400 MW required to pump the contents of the locks back up to the lake in 1/2 hr. One way, one lock. Ignores the big post-Panamax locks. Way too much power.
This re-activates the pro-blem that using fresh water avoided... .cross-contiamination of species from one ocean to the other
Cant go the other way as that would require pumping from sea level back to the lake. Takes too much power and is inefficient.
Building canals and using other, further away fresh water resources is not efficient neither. I wonder what would cost more. But if 400Mw/1/2h is realistic, than its way too much power needed.
@@evangatehouse5650 At 250W/m^2, you'd need 1.6 square kilometres of solar panels to provide 400MW of power. Given the size of the lakes, you could easily float that area of panels on them, and they'd help reduce evaporation, too. If you can build a 5kW array for $10k, then this would be somewhere around the billion-dollar mark. Expensive, but doable.
Very interesting documentary. I would be curious to know how the funds from the canal traffic are being reallocated and perhaps even redistributed to the citizens....
redistribution to the citizens, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!
At least there’s 1.6 million people that had watched this. Thank goodness there are still people out there paying attention.
During 1976 while on my way to Rio de Janerio from the Caribbean I had especially visited Panama to see the canal , so i found this report most interesting .
I was born in Panama, I've always wanted to visit it. I hope I can before everything goes to crap...
I visited it the last two years love it Next year going to Costa Rica You have to visit the Caribbean Side
The place is awesome
Isn't it feasible to pump the water back? Would be interesting to see the estimates
I was there 40 years ago, and there was already concern about the lack of water. Jungle forest cut down for farming, illegal / unregulated lumbering, the rainfall was dependent on the jungle's rain and it was already in danger.
It's poor people whom I cannot blame, responsible for most of the degradation.
Note: The answer to poverty is justice.
Oh come on we all know there weren't any droughts before Global warming or is it Global boiling?
I’m confused, they have oceans on both sides, water should be limitless as you have either ocean as sources. What am I missing?
@@Erin-Thor You cant pump sea water into the inland it would ruin the environment also would take a huge amount of energy. you could pump the fresh water back upstream within the lock system but once again it takes a lot of energy and would probably slow things down considerably.
@@thedave7760 - Interesting, I thought water was water, the inlet is open, and other locks like the Kiel Canal in Europe (Copenhagen?) use salt water.
@@Erin-Thor pumping sea water to far inland would be catastrophic for the forest ecology, the best way to conserve water is to fill a lock with a pump that is downstream. I am sure they do have pumps but the amount of water needed to fill a lock to raise a ship is huge and best done by draining water from above.
Left Panama in 2000, i will always remember seeing the ships roll through from a distance at recess. Simple days.
My ex and I were stationed at Fort Clayton across from Miraflores Locks in the early 80s. We could hear the horns all through the day and night. Panama is a beautiful country. I hope it starts raining soon. I'm astonished they're having a drought.
You have to wonder why they didn't simply build ports on either side and ship cargo by rail from one side to the other. It would have been easier to build, faster, and infinitely simpler to maintain.
Interesting, but may be the cost of unloading, reloading, customs, profits of ship owner among many other
Think of the logistics of this... if one of the newer cargo ships can hold about 12,000 containers and you have dozens of these *each day*, you're talking about the infrastructure to offload half a million containers per day, load them onto trains, unload at the opposite side and then reload onto another huge container ship, you'll find that the cost in both time, money and infrastructure vastly outweighs the practicability of this solution.
Interesting video.
I did not know they did not use sea water in the Panama canal.
Maybe they could use renewable energy to desalinate water (in zero salinity emissions plants) and fill the lakes, compensating for water shortages in dry seasons.
Alternatively,, they could isolate a reservoir and use sea water instead.
Wasting river and lake water like that, is a bad thing to do these days since there are far better uses for it.
The lakes are their drinking water.
@@johnmartlew This is why it should not be waisted.
Thy need a different solution, using sea water for the canal, one way or another.
Desalination was considered and rejected since it's much more expensive than building another reservoir and it's a technological solution which most Panamanians don't like since it would require maintenance
@@imeakdo7 There are no freebies nowadays.
Salt water operation for the canal would be preferable to diverting the countries sweet water resources in to it.
Predictions indicate that the future may be problematic as far as sweet water supply goes.
Alternatively they could dig a new salt water canal without the 26m height difference and the would only have to deal with the 0.4m water difference between the two ocean levels.
Some things no matter how expensive they may be initially, come out cheaper in the long run, all things considered.
@@FLORATOSOTHON the solution they've picked is making a new lake
In 1978or9 I read that the water feeding the canal would become a problem because of logging in the region. It said when the trees went the plants under their canopy would go too, nothing left to hold the soil together and contain water which in turn fed the rivers running into the canal.
Right the canal was cut through from one ocean to another so are we drying up one ocean or the other?
Did you even fact check that statement you read
You cant read or know dont much about canals.
This one seperate the Pacific and Anlantic biotops with fresh water.
By that it has too fresh water from the local area and too much. Thy that the area dryes up. Eve worse there are less rain by a El Nino periode.
So much is too dry at the west coast of America♥♥
@@nickislade5533 I've only heard of seawater going uphill in sci-fi stories. lol
6:55-7:34. It says, each boat uses between 200 and 250 million litres of FRESH WATER (from rivers via man-made lakes)to operate locks in the canal.
The fact I haven't checked is to see if logging was ever stopped.
@@cozmcwillie7897 flippin heck mate then the people that use the canals and lock systems in other parts of the world are all going downstream.not
I was aware that there are fresh lakes at either end of the canals however those boats traverse oceans at either end. are you an uneducated American or some other fool that doesn’t know how Canals and locks work.
What you have described is soil degradation after overlogging. Yes, this can happen. Another thought about this is that forests in the tropics - especially at elevation - keep moisture that falls from rains in the local areas. In turn this is the source of the runoff feeding Panama’s lakes, that run the Panama Canal. The key question is this: have these vital forests been over-logged recently or not? Personally, I don’t know. I’ll have to investigate.
My late husband was a marine engineer on Blue Star line. Went through panama canel many times. In 1967 we went back to Scotland via Panama Canel what an experience for me !
You will have to go on the Caledonian, sometime. You mustvtake in the gravity boat lift on the est Coast side / end .
The FALKIRK WHEEL.
At 4:33 a crane lifts the train tracks and shoves them sideways whole. How do the steel tracks bend like rubber then end up straight again ?
I took a cruise ship through the Panama Canal in April, it was absolutely amazing!
$300,000 / 12,000 containers = $25 a container. Not bad considering the distance, gas saved, and how much my EZ-pass toll was the other day. Crossing Pennsylvania on their turnpike costs more!
Thanks for doing the math! It is cheap! Cheers from New Zealand! 🐑🐑🇳🇿🇳🇿
Yes, container traffic is relatively cheap. The small boats pay a (relative) fortune however. There are many fees, hiring a pilot, perhaps deck hands, etc. The estimate given in the video of about $10k for a pleasure craft (think a couple in a small sailboat) is about right. That takes a big chunk out of your trip, good for a once (twice) in a lifetime experience.
It's $2 million for that load.
Great man made Canals in Panama 🇵🇦 and in 🇪🇬 in Suze Canal
Connected Atlantic and Pacific ocean and European countries Mediterranean Sea through Red Sea to Asian countries Sri Lanka too in Indian ocean
They should be able to put a string of windmills to pump the water back uphill. They have worked in Holland for centuries. And modern turbines are way more powerful and efficient.
The new canal was built with watersaving tanks to reduce the amount of water going down.
But windmills could easily pump the water back up from tank to tank.
Solar powered battery storage pumps could pump when there is no wind.
The United States could not “hand back” a canal to Panama which was never owned by Panama to begin with. Panama became the owner of the canal in December, 1999, for the first time.
But it was in their territory from the start ! Whatever may be installed on a certain land belongs to that country.
@@rainbowseeker5930 In 1903 Panama and the US agreed on a treaty which gave the U.S. the 525 square mile Canal Zone in perpetuity. The treaty included any improvements such as a canal. It also became to include homes, schools, hospitals, movie theaters, gymnasiums, Canal Zone government buildings and more. In return the United States guaranteed Panamas independence which meant the U.S. would militarily protect Panama if Colombia were to attempt to retake the country. It was Colombia’s land from the start.
It seems the permanent solution is to pump seawater into those lakes, and if a lake is used for drinking water, to build a dam to bisect it into a fresh and saltwater portion. There will be the ongoing cost of pumping seawater uphill, but it should be much less than what Los Angeles and Phoenix pay to pump water from the Colorado River west and east, respectively, to those cities.
Ricaurte Vásquez Morales is a Panamanian economist, who currently serves as the administrator of the Panama Canal. He has held key roles in the Panamanian government, including Minister of Finance and Treasury, Minister of Economy and Finance, and Minister of Planning and Economic Policy. He was Panama Canal's first non-US Chief Financial Officer.
Ricaurte Vásquez (Public administration manager - Administrador de la Autoridad del Canal de Panamá - Panama) earns a salary of $320,000.00 per year.
Could it be practical to install some heavy volume pumps that pump water back from the sea into one of the lock segments, that should reduce the amount of fresh water lost?
Great video, thank you so much! I always wondered why did the 2 oceans had different leves, and they had to use the gates. It turns out, it wasn't the oceans, but the lakes! :) Do you guys think it would be possible to connect the 2 oceans straight without the use of gates and lakes?
depends on the ground levels between the oceans
Even connecting the oceans directly wouldn't solve the main issue which is the ballooning size of naval container freight to keep up with global supply chains.
The Panama and Suez canals were originally constructed in a time when global trade was a mere tiny fraction of what it is today - even the expansions that have occurred since are not even close to enough to keep up with demand.
Of course it would @@mnomadvfx If they connected the two oceans they would need to carve out an entirely new canal, they would make it big enough for the biggest ship and then some. I don't see any other way around it. They need to start over from scratch.
I think there is a slight difference in ocean heights across the canal, but it would only be possible to connect the oceans without locks if an entirely different route with no existing freshwater assets in the way was chosen, which would mean cutting it through the higher elevation lands and maybe as much as 10 times or more the amount of excavating needed for the original canal when all factors were taken into account. And there would be a steady strong one-way current in the canal that the ships would then have to overcome if there was not even one lock, and lots more ecological contamination than if there could be at least one lock used to partially separate the oceans.
Thanks for the info! How did they deal with that in the Suez?@@certiPHIer
I remember being near the canal. I was once stationed in Fort Clayton U.S. Army base, north of the canal.
What a marvel of a structure. Hope to see it again as a tourist. As an ex-engineer of the army.
How about desalination of seawater and pumped back to the canal?
Needs a ton of power to operate the desalination plants and pumps.
How about just plane sea water? I don't understand why they have not talked about pumping water from the Pacific up into the locks. I know it would be a huge undertaking. But surely it should be considered. Sea water would make the whole enterprise a lot simpler for everyone, save all that fresh water for the citizens of the country. Why is fresh water necessary for ocean-going ships? It is not. What are the human costs for the Panamanians - who do not profit at all from the canal - for taking more of their water from them for the profits of the corporations and government workers. Maybe the costs to construct the pump gear and to power it up to the locks would be less overall than desalination and loss of revenue from shipping going the other way - around the Tierra in the South or the Arctic Ocean in the North, which invites war between Russia and Canada and Russia and the U.S.
@@DanielCunningham_Gia-na-dai search on google "panama canal height layout" and select images, you can see they need to go up then down again to cross the land. The design is old but with enough money i'm sure they can install large pumps that could recycle the water but with the way government are set up, they refuse to fork out the money and prefer to pass the problem to the next guy in charge until everything is too late. Fuck politicians
Alternatively, they should consider pumping the water from the locks back to the lakes that support the Canal instead of dumping it into the ocean. The pumps would be massive and might require a nuclear power plant to operate but it probably wouldn't more expensive or ecologically problematic that the other proposed solutions.
@@DanielCunningham_Gia-na-dai To my knowledge there are no pumps. The fresh water lakes esp Gatun is the water reservoir that operates the canal. The new locks have holding ponds. Having pumps to move water esp sea water costs money and have to be maintained. The locks are all fed water by gravity flow.
And what is Ricaute Vasquez salary and other financial interest in holding shipping at a standstill?
Why was there not 2 parallel locks build - one for North travel and one for South travel - the water could be passed between the 2 sides to lower one direction while the other is raised. Twice the number of ships could pass through the canal per day and the only loss of water would be evaporation. I can't believe the engineers on this project missed this water saving, time saving, energy saving, and efficiency increasing solution. Even with the additional cost it would surely recover the expense in less than half the time the current concept is inefficiently doing!
Come now, that would be common sense. Still thinking like that...
Come now, that would be common sense. Stop thinking like that...
The old locks are two way. use google and look at the pics.
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. In this usage pattern, the paired locks offer redundancy during maintenance or in the event of mechanical issues.
Why couldn’t they redesign the canal to be at the same depth as the two oceans. Then you would not need locks and could block off the lakes from draining out to sea. Would cost billions but would solve most of there problems.
Recycle the water instead of releasing it. And use sea water instead.
Re direct the fresh water back into the land so you can live.
??? how do you think you can do it? you can't take the fresh water inside the lock and change it with salt water, that means you would have the ship aground inside the lock
Using water pumps could bring in unlimited sea water.
Water flows down hill not up hill.
if new reservoirs can be created could not the cannel be lowered to reduce the locks and/or lifting of the ships?
Why don't they allow sea water from the two oceans that it links, flow thru the canal? Is it not possible since there are two oceans on both ends of the canal?
I was stationed at Howard Air Force Base from 1990-1995. I knew many Panamanians in government and the Panama Canal Authority. We closed out our (US) presence in Panama on 31 Dec 1999. Everything has gone downhill since we pulled out. Also the Canal Security contract was awarded to a Chinese company by the Panama Canal Authority. Sad!,,
Nice, I was stationed at Ft. Kobbe (77-79) right there at Howard AFB. I heard the Chinese were involved in canal management too, not only security. And why would they even be permitted to run security at such a strategic interest of the U.S.? Guess they are still butt hurt from Operation Just Cause, lol. I was there (down town Panama City) when Pres. Carter visited to officially hand the Canal back over to the Panamanians. They had a field day, ripping down U.S. flags, they even scaled the bridge to remove the American flag from it, dropping it into the canal. I think this whole thing stinks of Chinese mis-management, much like they do their own countrys in frastructure.
@@BADMONTESS
Indeed ft kobbe 74
I grew up in South America, and the corruption in all the countries is rampant. Everybody in the government or in the big private companies wants a piece of the action (the money). When a certain amount is set aside for maintenance for example, 25% of it is actually spent on the project. The rest is split between the people in charge of authorizing the work.
The building of large systems is generally insane. Think about it. You have a system that connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and it is running out of water!
❤😂😂😂😅😅😅
Because it’s highest point is above the level of the Oceans. Opening the locks would mean two things, the highest points will fall dry, and the rest will become salt water.
Thank you for the explanation. Still seems like pumps would have been a good alternative solution.@@joostprins3381
They need better pumps with hoses
So 🥸You didn't understand anything in this video?
Who would had tought that a water shortage would become a problem on connecting 2 oceans.
crazy idea, but why not dig away more rock over the whole length? if the ship locks only have to raise ships up by 5 meters instead of 100, they can save around 95% of the water
A huge portion of the canal consists of two land-locked fresh-water lakes - it was built to conform to those lake levels. To dig a channel deep enough to get down close to sea level would take a) billions, if not trillions of dollars, b) take another 10-15 years, c) drastically lower the level of the existing lakes, affecting all the industry and life around a thousand miles of coastline.
What I can't figure out is why they rely on freshwater from artificial lakes for the raising/lowering? I know that the locks/canal system at Sault Ste. Marie, MI (AKA "The Soo Locks" to locals) uses neither "outside" water, nor pumps to perform the exact same task. To raise an upbound (from Huron to Superior) vessel, it enters the lowest lock, the gates are closed, and valves are opened to allow water from the next lock up to flow into the current one until the height is matched, the valves are closed, the upper gates open, the vessel is towed out of that lock to the next, the gates close behind it, and the process repeats until the vessel enters the last lock, which is filled directly from Lake Superior, then it exits onto Lake Superior. For downbound traffic, the reverse happens - The vessel enters the "top" lock, the lock is drained "downstream" (toward Huron) to match levels, the vessel gets towed out of that lock to the next, and the process repeats until the vessel exits the final lock onto Lake Huron. In this process, *NO* pumps or "outside" water are used at any time - the entire system is gravity powered, and uses only water that would have flowed from Superior to Huron via a nasty stretch of unnavigable rapids in the St. Mary's River if the locks/canal system weren't in place to bypass it. As I understand the geography of the Panama Canal, things are very similar, other than width and total distance traversed, with the Pacific ocean standing in for Lake Superior on the "high" end, and the Atlantic Ocean being the equivalent of Lake Huron at the "low" end. So why does the Panama canal need *TWO* lakes worth of fresh water to achieve what happens at The Soo using nothing but the water from the "high end" of the system?
There is a much more sinister cause for these water levels to drop - which is not mentioned in the documentary as it's only recently that the topic has surfaced. Copper mining operations led by Canadian mining company First Quantum Minerals seem to be affecting the water levels of the Panama Canal. This is terrible for the country. The past two years, all the 'draught' and low water levels have been attributed to 'climate change', but seems that this change is directly caused by mining copper in the area of Colon- an industry that uses extraordinary amounts of water. The mine is the biggest open-pit mine in the whole of Central America and the conessions of land are the size of the city of Miami.
What's more, despite the claims of the Canadian company assuring that they only use rainwater, there have been rumours that they have pipes running extra officially to pump water from rivers used as backup for the Canal watershed (rio Indio, for instance). The mine has also destroyed the protected Mesoamerican Biological Corridor - which is essential for the retention of water and one of the most important tropical forests of Central America for wildlife to pass from one country to another all the way from south of Mexico - through seven countries- down to Panama. Thousands of virgin tropical forest are gone.
One way or the other, given the vast extensions of virgin tropical forest that the Canadian company has ravaged (complete destruction) and the obnoxious amount of water that their operations use, it's not surprising that such operations could be the real cause behind the so-called 'climate change' that push water levels to be so low (climate change sounds more like a ghost, but in reality has a name!).
For this and other reasons, there have been very intense protests since Oct 20th, 2023 (ongoing). The people of Panama want the mining contract to be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court- as it violates many rights and puts at threat nature, the economy and the Panama Canal itself.
As in most disasters the cause is multiple.
There is less rainfall this season. Perhaps next season the problem is excess rain. It is the cycle and if we do not have El Niño or La Niña or something else, the rain will be just right.
The original Panama Canal had the locks and used the Gatun Lake reservoir. There was times of water shortage too. But this time the water shortage is exacerbated by the increase of traffic and the introduction of new sets of locks.
The new set of locks was supposed to reuse the water from the locks and not lose it to the sea. This seems to be only 10% efficient, meaning that the lakes are ok, the river is ok, the rain is below average but the water level has decreased because every time the locks are operated, water from Gatun Lake is lost. The more ships cross the Canal, the more the lake is drained.
The project should have saved more water from the operation of the locks, using pumps to the reuse reservoirs and charge the cost to the traffic.
your plan is not economically practical.
Can sea water be pump into the canal. Just asking
Stationed in Panama in the 90's during transition. I do have to admit, that the common estimate it would take them less than 10 years to screw it up was wrong, but only by about half.
As an alleviating measure, why not start a process to exchange loads on ships between coasts? Build a multiple line rail line between coasts to allow for unloading of a Pacific ship's cargo and match up to an Atlantic ship for further carrying to its destination? Ships that are too far back may register their load (with owner authorization) to be picked up by another ship. They hit the docks and get unloaded and then look for a load to take back their way. Maybe only valid for container ships but might help alleviate the backlogs some.
There is and has been a railroad line from Pacific to Atlantic coasts. They do move loads by rail between coasts, or effectively between different ships. They take containers off one ship on one coast, and load them on railroad cars. They reverse the process on the opposite side. This railroad parallels the canal itself.
@@lancebailey683 Thank you Lance.. They may need to push that more if the wait is too great. But that they have it already is good to know.
No problem. I saw a show about the train track about 6 months ago. The speaker took a ride with them, including loading and unloading in both ends. He indicated there is time pressure to get the loads through on time, and getting the loads to the appropriate ships. Interesting show. Supposedly, that was done even back when the Panama Canal was being dug. They would rail transport loads from one coast to the other, connecting with ships dropping off and picking up loads. Modern trains now, of course. The ones that move the ocean cargo containers. The railroad paralleled the canal route, and the trains were fairly large.
th-cam.com/video/WsBr9drKJR4/w-d-xo.htmlsi=Pujtwlz2siOmFjRY
That is the Smithsonian short film about the train linking the two coasts.
As noted this is done but very costly as each container is handled 4 times
For those who think concerns for the environment prevent the use of seawater instead of fresh in the locks, remember these ships are burning 'bunker fuel', the least refined and most contaminating type of diesel. It's so polluting, the global container ship fleet produce more aerial contaminants than all the motor vehicles in operation on land combined. Although it's bad enough bunker fuel use is prohibited within 200 miles of the US and EU coasts, it is allowed, however, in the Canal itself. We lived with the effects each day, cleaning a greasy black soot from every horizontal surface. And we lived miles from the Canal.
Oceans on both sides of the canal, yet they have a water supply problem? Sounds more like a lack of imagination.
Maybe they cant let the seawater into their freshwater, idk
@@thomassill7218 That was my niave assertion - how to limit the loss of fresh water from the lake. Perhaps just use lake water to fill the upper locks on both sides, but from that closed lock, fill the down hill locks with ocean water pumped from the Pacific and the Gulf. That would lessen the outflow of fresh water significantly. I'm definitely not a civil engineer, so I don't know if this is a practical solution, but building a canal was just a fever dream when it was proposed, so who knows?
Is there a way to constantly pump ocean water back into lake Gatun in periods of drought?
Interestingly, when each ship is built there is a plaque on the bridge that has a number used to calculate what is the "normal" cost to transit the canal.
Nope. That's the International Tonnage. The Panama and Suez Canals both use their own special tonnage calculation which is different than normal tonnage.
@@evangatehouse5650 Well, I took a photo (it was mounted on the wall) and the plaque (card) says:
The Panama Canal
Canal de Panama
Ship Identification Number
301477
Keep this card in the wheel house
you must report this number on all arrival
messages for transits or port calls
Executive Vice President of Operations, Panama Canal Authority
As the South American rainforests are reduced to open grassy savannah, the rainfall reduces.
Wrong.
@@irchrisbyou are wrong. Do your research, it's very basic.
I used to live at Ft Gulick CZ . I used to throw rocks into the canal :) . It looks like to me they could pump the water back into the lake instead of letting it drain into the ocean when they are lowering the ship in the lock.
Greetings I am Arthur McGowan From Jamaica Blue Mountains
I think the problem that now exists at the 12:10 Panama Canel call for the recycling of the water that is lost to the sea when each ship passes. Pump back and Used that same water to fill alternate Locks. With the water that flows in the canel and the water that been pump back (recycled ) the lock will fill up much faster allowing ships to pass through in record time.
Method :used what you have to get what you want.
Sounds like they need to institute a system pumping lock water ack up stream to help maintain the water level.
The feasability of restarting construction of the Panama Canal as a USA sponsored project resulted from the first surveys done of the inland climate's actual rainfall. This proved a canal using locks and dams to create water depths that would allow ships to transit much more of the route with much less earth excavation was a practical proposition. Scientific progress in fighting the diseases that crippled the first attempt to build the canal was also extremely important.