The Panama Canal Expands
wsj.com
wsj.com
We were angry about losing, from our perspective, our homeland. The Canal Zone police force was disbanded and the PDF (Panama Defense Forces) started patrolling my home town. More and more Panama encroached on what I thought of as my homeland. During Noriega I was convinced Panama would run the canal into the ground.
I went back to Panama 8 years ago and I was pleasantly surprised at the progress the country has made. They've done a great job in running the canal and the country has noticeably benefited from America's withdrawal. My anecdotal experience is that colonialism is bad. Even in benign forms.
I talked with an elderly rabiblanco the last time I was there. He said America leaving made Panama grow up. By all indications they have done so and I'm glad to see it.
Your comment is missing the part where the US military had to go in and take down Noriega. The intervention allowed Guillermo Endara to take power and dissolved the Panamanian Defense Force. Without it, Noriega would certainly still be in power.
Under Torrijos–Carter Treaties the US has a right to intervene militarily to protect the canal. This is probably the biggest thing keeping it from becoming a defacto Russian or Chinese port or drug-runner owned port. Look, I'm all for local politics but your post suggests that everything just went fine with the locals, but in reality the port will always be under US protection in one form or another, which helps keep it thriving.
Remember locals were outraged and protesting in the streets that the US dare attack their beloved bloodthristy dictator. Dies hards still exist:
>Eighteen years after the invasion, Panama's National Assembly unanimously declared 20 December 2007 to be a day of national mourning.
Source: wikipedia.
Lots of civilians died in El Chorillo. It's ok for people to mourn their loss. There were bad and stupid decisions on both sides during those days.
> Without it, Noriega would certainly still be in power.
That's debatable. Thankfully the US took care of the situation efficiently, but the general climate was pointing towards a bloody civil war.
> Under Torrijos–Carter Treaties the US has a right to intervene militarily to protect the canal.
Thankfully in my opinion. Though you could argue that it also makes the Canal a target.
> Remember locals were outraged and protesting in the streets that the US dare attack their beloved bloodthirsty dictator. Dies hards still exist
This is the only part I truly disagree with. A very small minority actually protested in favor of General Noriega. Pretty much the whole country was on board with removing him from power with the obvious exception of people that followed him to power of their own. Panamanians were not outraged because of the removal of their dictator, but of the methods used to do so that left a bloody trail and piles of dead bodies.
December 20 is a national mourning day in recognition of the people that gave their life during such turmoil, not in the name of a power hungry and greedy Noriega.
EDIT: The US soldiers where super nice to me as a kid. I even got to drive in a tank and they gave me a shitload of soda.
I've always found it notable that the purpose of the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama was to remove a dictator and replace him with a democratically elected government.
The solution to the political question was to carefully choose a default set of things which would be accepted as "US states", along with sets of constants describing other options you could plug in. One of those, which still lives today as localflavor.us.us_states.OBSOLETE_STATES, lists codes which once were accepted as "states" by the USPS, but no longer are. One of those is, of course, the abbreviation for the Panama Canal Zone ('CZ'). So if you ever need to send mail back in time to the Canal Zone, Django will help you do it.
Until now, the maximum amount of containers on a ship that could fit was 5000. New locks - 14,000 containers.
One thing I hope though is this is future-proof by building for larger than the largest current ships. Is this the case?
Edit: Oops, I missed the editing deadline.
That's written from the perspective of 'water shortages during the dry season are one reason they built new locks, which can reuse water'. It doesn't begin to address any impact on the oceans.
Maybe there is an opportunity to make use of osmotic power https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osmotic_power with the locks.
According to http://www.marinelink.com/news/watersaving-panama-canal40472... :
> And each [pond] utilizes state-of-the art technology which allows the Canal to reuse 60 percent of the water used per lockage, saving 7 percent more than the existing locks do.
Also, the current system requires no power, except to open and close valves. It is expensive to pump water uphill, because water is heavy.
The Mississippi River discharges about 17,000m³ a second. Each day, that river alone discharges 1,450,828,800m³ of water.
Closer to the canal, the Amazon River discharges as much water as a ship locking does every ½ second. Admittedly, the Amazon River is by far the largest river in terms of discharge.
If my math is right, the Panama Canal uses less water than a small metropolis.
This water isn't being pulled out of storage and dumped in the ocean, it's precipitation that would be going into the ocean anyway.
Using it in the canal first could very well reduce the amount of fresh water that reaches the ocean, since retaining it would cause some evaporation loss. Although I'm sure that's completely insignificant either way.
A city/metro area 10 times as big with comparable industry, which is still pretty small, would indeed about equal the water the canal puts to very good use, no waste I say. If you've ever been to the Canal Zone, you know it has absolutely no lack for water, heck, we've been doing jungle training there forever.
Usually, canal operators have to carefully balance ship throughput with available flow to not drain their highest level, investing in savings basins if necessary.
The Panama canal is using a large natural lake as the highest level, which means that overutilization of the available flow would not be immediately noticeable. In this situation, it is not at all unreasonable to be concerned that planners might be a bit too optimistic in terms of flow available/savings basins required or operators in terms of flow available/throughput sustainable. It would be a shame to drain a lake just to get stuff from China to New York a tiny little bit cheaper than it already is.
Perhaps.
There are a whole lot of lakes in the world, and only one shortcut between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
The highest level is Gatun Lake, which is artificial.
> "planners might be a bit too optimistic in terms of flow"
Certainly, though deforestation leading to reduced water capacity for the area seems to be the larger problem. There are already problems during dry season. The issues you point are already known and important considerations for the Panama Canal and its recent upgrades.