Bigger Ships, So a Bigger Panama Canal

07 August 2011

Workers dig an area where a new set of locks of the Panama Canal will be built in Cocoli, near Panama City

This is the VOA Special English Technology Report.

The Panama Canal opened almost one hundred years ago. More than one million ships have passed through the waterway since nineteen fourteen.

The Panama Canal connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It reduces travel by thirteen thousand kilometers. It avoids the need for ships to sail around Cape Horn at the bottom of South America.

More than forty ships pass through the canal each day -- more than fourteen thousand each year. Now, a major expansion project will permit more ships -- and bigger ships -- to pass through the canal.

Jorge Luis Quijano is the Panama Canal’s executive vice president of engineering. He told VOA's Zulima Palacio that the canal is operating at its limit.

JORGE LUIS QUIJANO: "The present canal has a total capacity of about three hundred and forty million tons a year that it can handle, that's the maximum capacity. With the expansion we expect to double that, over six hundred million tons that we can handle in a year."

Ships pass through a series of locks. These locks raise a ship to the level of Gatun Lake at the canal entrance on the Atlantic side. They lower the ship back to sea level on the Pacific side.