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THE
top Panama Canal planner confessed to being
surprised by developments in skyrocketing
ship sizes over the last seven years, but
feels that much of the US east coast-bound
cargo from Asia lost to the rival Suez Canal
will return once the Central American waterway
expansion completed in 2015.
Now
limited to 4,500-TEU ships, the Panama canal
expansion was designed to more than double
capacity handling 10,000-TEUers, but that
grossly underestimated the growth in containership
sizes which have shot up in the last seven
years to 18,000 TEU with talk of 22,000
TEUers yet to come.
"When
we were designing this six or seven years
ago, we asked the shipping industry ...
and they told us to be confident that we
would not need larger locks than we had
designed," the rueful Panama Canal
planning chief Rodolfo Sabonge told a recent
shipping conference organised by the South
Carolina Ports Authority.
"I
don't think six months have passed by that
since they haven't asked us to increase
the size of the locks," Mr Sabonge
said, adding that changes were made within
the scope of the original design to increase
capacity to 13,000-TEU ships in some cases.
Even so, there are projections that when
the enlarged canal opens, nine per cent
of the world's container fleet will be too
big to use it.
The
biggest ship the expanded Panama Canal can
accommodate might be called a "panafit"
because it will be especially built to fit
the locks exactly rather like a Canadian
laker fits into St Lawrence Seaway locks
with inches to spare port and starboard,
fore and aft. It can also add another layer
of boxes on the weather deck for transit
in calmer seas.
Mr
Sabonge said the appearance of increasingly
larger ships have fundamentally altered
what most estimated the US$5 billion Panama
Canal expansion would mean to the global
maritime industry, certainly less than once
envisaged.
Radical
thinking of only a few years ago has become
old hat. Back then, the Panama Canal was
the exciting all-water route for shipments
between Asia and the US east coast, eclipsing
the old route to the US west coast with
its costly overland journey east to where
most American consumers live - east of the
Mississippi.
Today.
many east and Gulf coast ports are scrambling
to hack through the dense underbrush of
feasibility studies, public hearings, greenie
law suits and general red tape, years before
such projects are truly shovel ready. In
Savannah, now 6,500-TEU capable, took more
than a decade before a dredger hit bottom
after millions were spent on paper pushers
before one hardhat earned a dollar.
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