Panama Canal in crisis

Panama did not give operational control of the Panama Canal to the Chinese government. The Panama Canal is an important international waterway that connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and it is currently operated and managed by the Panama Canal Authority (ACP), which is an independent government agency of Panama. The ACP has control of the canal and its operations, and it does not involve any other country or government in its management.
 
After a little looking around I find it likely that the root problem is not drought, it is that the canal was expanded thus uses more water but they took no action to get the amount of water the new system needs.
 
Panama drought and its impact on bulk shipping

When a vessel transits the canal, around 50 million gallons of water is thrown out of the lake which needs to be replenished, but with less rainfall in the past few months, this is unlikely to happen. The authorities are working on possible solutions – reducing the cargo level, helping ships maintain draft levels and measures to reduce the amount of water lost from the lake.

To preserve fresh water in the Gatun lake, which is also the only fresh water source for Panama country, the Panama Canal authority imposed draft restrictions from 24 May at 45.5 feet, which was later revised to 44.0 feet for Neo-Panamax locks with water levels not improving and forecast to remain at five-year lows until October.

The Panama Canal Authority has also restricted the number of vessels transiting through the Panamax locks from the usual 23 slots to 14 slots – 10 large vessels and 4 regulars with premiums on heavier and larger ships. The imposed restrictions have increased the vessel backlog to a high of 162 vessels on 8 August, with the average waiting time rising to over 20 days. As the holiday season approaches, the movement of merchandise will soon pick-up, potentially leading to further congestion.


https://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/panama-drought-and-its-impact-on-bulk-shipping/
 
This is another place where having journalists would have been nice....The Mind Molders blame global warming to promote the New World Order narrative and call it a day.

It looks like incompetence....that there was never thought given to the water needs of the remade canal....prob just did some magical thinking that everything would work out.
 
Hawkeye10 said:
Everybody suffers if dont, and we dont even know if this was not on purpose.....the forces of Evil are now everywhere.
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It could be as simple as the Panamanians opening a third, much larger, set of locks, and relying on Chinese engineering to build them...

https://acidcow.com/pics/18848-chinese-construction-fail-13-pics.html

China's Three Gorges Dam: An Environmental Catastrophe?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinas-three-gorges-dam-disaster/

China is infamous for shoddy construction, environmental disasters resulting from construction projects, etc.
 
T. A. Gardner said:
It could be as simple as the Panamanians opening a third, much larger, set of locks, and relying on Chinese engineering to build them...

https://acidcow.com/pics/18848-chinese-construction-fail-13-pics.html

China's Three Gorges Dam: An Environmental Catastrophe?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinas-three-gorges-dam-disaster/

China is infamous for shoddy construction, environmental disasters resulting from construction projects, etc.
Click to expand...

This project did not choose experienced mega project builders, the who did the planning and the building is all very murky....but important concrete was crumbling before the first ship used the new structures.
 
In 2016, Espino de Marotta oversaw a massive expansion of the canal, but the water-saving basins built alongside the wider locks didn’t make up for declining water supplies. That is now her central concern for a project aimed for completion in 2028. It is likely to combine approaches: diversion from other sources, reuse of waste water, and perhaps desalination.

“Things have changed, so we need to change,” Espino de Marotta says.

Espino de Marotta is happiest in the field. She walks onto a balcony overlooking the canal at the Miraflores locks while a container ship crosses, then peers into the distance. Seeing a second large vessel immobile, she asks why it isn’t moving. Below, a small specialist boat crosses the canal, and she snaps a picture on her phone. It was dispatched in the morning to inspect for a potential oil spill—a false alarm. In just a few hours, she will be off to inspect maintenance work at the canal’s Atlantic end.

A marine engineer and mother of three, Espino de Marotta graduated from Texas A&M University and became one of just two women working in the canal shipyard. She held numerous posts before leading the $5.25 billion expansion.

Since the water that feeds the canal’s two artificial lakes is also drunk by more than 2 million people, tension has arisen between two vital needs.

“We want to guarantee that we can provide potable water for the population and a competitive and reliable draft for transiting vessels.” Espino de Marotta says, noting that in the pandemic era shipping has taken on added significance.

Climate change is inescapable. The rainy season is starting later, according to Steve Paton of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. In addition to droughts, the country has experienced 8 of its 10 greatest storms over the past 21 years, and reservoirs aren’t big enough to capture excess water and store it for dry periods. In 2010, intense rains almost toppled one of the canal’s dams and forced the waterway to close temporarily for the first time since 1989.

“Changing weather patterns at a global level are having a very local effect here in Panama,” Paton says.

The result, Espino de Marotta says, is that water can no longer be taken for granted. Specialists monitor lake levels and rainfall daily, tracking evaporation. Hydrologists meet weekly to draft a plan to save water over the next two weeks.
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https://gcaptain.com/finding-water-panama-canal/

Pretty much an admission that water planning was shoddy.
 
Historical Panama rain totals are remarkably hard to find but this site claims that rain has been stable from 1901 to 2020, though there have always been variations:

https://climateknowledgeportal.worldbank.org/country/panama/climate-data-historical




Rainfall anomalies in climate stations in the Canal area were −30% in 1976, −24% in 1982, and −35% in 1998 [Estoque et al., 1985; Donoso et al., Panama Canal case study, 2003]. Anomalously short rainy seasons (exceeding 2σ of mean) in 1976, 1982, and 1997 preceded low lake levels, and the following dry seasons were anomalously long. Comparison of Gatun lake levels and the NINO3 (5°N–5°S, 150°–90°W) sea surface temperature (SST) data (available at http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/data/indices/) in Figure 2 reveals that pronounced warming in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean is associated with reduced lake levels in the Panama Canal Zone. Anomalously low lake levels are prominent in 1973, 1976/1977, 1983, and 1997/1998, all of which are associated with El Niño events.
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https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2004JD004694
 
Like the leak, the water shortage hit at an inopportune time. Just one day after the last load warning, the canal authorities issued instructions for neo-Panamax vessels seeking to use the new locks after they open. The large ships would not be able to carry much more than the smaller vessels in the old passage — hardly a good return on investment for shippers or the canal.

Load restrictions are not new, but these came after Gatun had been dredged to collect more water for the new locks. When they open, Gatun will have to supply nearly twice as much water for the old and new locks combined. Mr. Quijano declined to answer questions about water availability.

Canal officials blamed El Niño for the drought, and the load restrictions were eventually lifted after several days of heavy rain. But this weather pattern was no more unexpected than the prospect of more shortages due to global warming and increased public water consumption.

“We’re going to have some problems on the dry side,” said Jorge Espinosa, a former manager of the canal authority’s water resource unit. “This El Niño was pretty tough on the canal.”

In fact, two international banks had questioned the wisdom of expanding the canal without a new water source. In 2008, the Inter-American Development Bank called water availability “the principal project risk,” according to a consultant’s report last year.

The World Bank raised similar concerns in a 2008 report, citing, among other factors, faster-than-expected growth in Panamanians’ water consumption. If this trend continues, the bank said, it “may result in a reduction in the level of confidence at which the canal could operate.”

Canal officials, too, recognized the need to find more water as they began planning for the new locks. But their solution ran into a political firestorm.

In 1999, Mr. Alemán, the first canal administrator, had helped secure passage of a law giving the canal authority control over the western watershed, where dams could create a new reservoir.

The impoverished people who would have been displaced were not pleased, and with the help of a Roman Catholic Church activist group, they protested. It was morally wrong, the local bishop, Msgr. Carlos María Ariz, wrote in a letter to Panama’s president, to destroy the farmers’ “lifestyles and traditions” for the sake of the canal.

The government pushed back. Under pressure, the church appointed a new bishop and fired the activist group’s leader, Héctor Endara Hill, after 20 years of community work. Another leader of the protests, Francisco Aperador, whom the church had sent to Panama to work with the indigenous population, was expelled from the country, Mr. Endara said.

The new bishop “confessed in a team meeting that he was named to ‘chop heads,’ and mine was the first one to roll,” he said. “Later, after much mistreatment, harassment and persecution, a great majority were fired.”

The canal’s chief engineer, Thomas Drohan, was forced out around 2000, after criticizing the watershed plan, Mr. Endara said. Mr. Drohan declined to comment for this article.

But ultimately, fearing the loss of a national referendum on canal expansion, the legislature reversed itself in 2006 and rescinded the law. The canal authority switched positions, as well, and said it did not need a new reservoir. Water-saving basins were built so the canal could reuse 60 percent of the water that fills the locks as ships pass through, according to canal officials.
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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/06/22/world/americas/panama-canal.html

What's plan B?
 
guno said:
Panama drought and its impact on bulk shipping

When a vessel transits the canal, around 50 million gallons of water is thrown out of the lake which needs to be replenished, but with less rainfall in the past few months, this is unlikely to happen. The authorities are working on possible solutions – reducing the cargo level, helping ships maintain draft levels and measures to reduce the amount of water lost from the lake.

To preserve fresh water in the Gatun lake, which is also the only fresh water source for Panama country, the Panama Canal authority imposed draft restrictions from 24 May at 45.5 feet, which was later revised to 44.0 feet for Neo-Panamax locks with water levels not improving and forecast to remain at five-year lows until October.

The Panama Canal Authority has also restricted the number of vessels transiting through the Panamax locks from the usual 23 slots to 14 slots – 10 large vessels and 4 regulars with premiums on heavier and larger ships. The imposed restrictions have increased the vessel backlog to a high of 162 vessels on 8 August, with the average waiting time rising to over 20 days. As the holiday season approaches, the movement of merchandise will soon pick-up, potentially leading to further congestion.


https://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/panama-drought-and-its-impact-on-bulk-shipping/
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Something is not right here. When a ship enters the lock, the larger the ship and deeper it's draft means the MORE water is displaced in that lock by the ship meaning the LESS water is "thrown out" when leaving the lock. The maximum amount of water dumped out and into the ocean when the lock opens would happen if there was no ship at all in the lock. I would think they would want to pack that lock with as many ships as possible every time it is operated. The more they can displace water in the lock with ships means the less water is lost when operating it. Why would they want to limit the size of ships when the bigger they are the less water is lost?

OK I got it. Reducing the draft of ships is because the water levels are dropping low enough that they are worried about them running aground in the shallower portions of the canal. Still, the bigger the ship the less water lost when a lock does it's thing.;)
 
Hawkeye10 said:
After a little looking around I find it likely that the root problem is not drought, it is that the canal was expanded thus uses more water but they took no action to get the amount of water the new system needs.
Click to expand...
You are correct, it is poor management. Panamá could cut in half the water loss to Gatún lake and double the efficiency with which they expedite traffic through the canal if the Panamá Canal Authority would duplex the canal, i.e. allow traffic both ways through the locks at the same time. They don't. They could, but they don't. They use simplex operations. It is intentional.

Also, this is not the first time Gatún lake has been "low" on water. It happens often. All canal traffic drains massive amounts of water from the lake. If the rainfall in any given year falls below average (which occurs about half the time), Gatún lake falls below "average." As shipping traffic increases, Gatún lake keeps taking greater and greater hits.

... and that's really the bottom line. Panamá wants to get in line for free "Climate" money by pointing to decreases in Gatún lake that are caused by their mismanagement and by their desire to increase revenues through increased shipping traffic.
 
guno said:
Panama did not give operational control of the Panama Canal to the Chinese government. The Panama Canal is an important international waterway that connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and it is currently operated and managed by the Panama Canal Authority (ACP), which is an independent government agency of Panama. The ACP has control of the canal and its operations, and it does not involve any other country or government in its management.
Click to expand...

managed by the Panama Canal Authority (ACP)

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