PANAMA CITY, July 15 — The Panama Canal is one of those feats of engineering that seems almost impossible, even now. It lifts enormous cargo ships eighty-five feet above sea level, carries them across a lake, and then lowers them down the other side. The whole thing happens without a single pump.
For the ships that move through these locks, the journey is a slow, deliberate process. Gravity does the heavy lifting.
Water from Gatun Lake flows through a system of culverts and valves, filling the chambers and raising vessels as if they were toys in a bathtub. The original locks, built between 1904 and 1914, are a century old and still running.
Three sets of original locks
There are three sets of these original locks. On the Atlantic side, the Gatun Locks. On the Pacific side, the Pedro Miguel Locks and the Miraflores Locks.
Each chamber in these older locks is 110 feet wide, 1,000 feet long, and 41 feet deep. The dimensions were massive for their time, but they set a limit on the size of ships that could pass through.
That limit changed in 2016. The expansion project added a third set of locks, one at Agua Clara on the Atlantic side and one at Cocoli on the Pacific side. These new locks are wider and longer — 180 feet wide, 1,400 feet long, and 60 feet deep.
They were built to handle the Neopanamax class of ships, vessels that can carry up to 15,000 TEUs, or twenty-foot equivalent units, the standard measure for container capacity.
Water-saving innovation
The new locks use rolling gates instead of the traditional miter gates found in the original chambers. More importantly, they include water-saving basins that recycle 60 percent of the water used in each transit. This matters because the canal runs on fresh water.
Each time a ship passes through, it consumes about 52 million gallons of fresh water from Gatun Lake. That is 197 million liters, all of it drawn from the same artificial lake that supplies drinking water to Panama City.
The canal operates around the clock, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A typical transit takes between eight and ten hours from ocean to ocean. For the crews aboard those Neopanamax ships, that means a full workday spent moving through the locks, watching the water rise and fall around them.
The system is elegant in its simplicity. No pumps, just gravity and a network of underground culverts.
The water flows in, the ship rises. The water flows out, the ship descends. It has worked that way since 1914, and now, with the expanded locks and their water-saving basins, it works for the biggest ships on the ocean.
Sources
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