your person in panama

About a mile long, several hundred feet wide and more than 100 feet deep, the excavation is an initial step in the building of a larger set of locks for the Panama Canal that should double the amount of goods that can pass through it each year.

The $5.25 billion project, scheduled for completion in 2014, is the first expansion in the history of the century-old shortcut between the Atlantic and Pacific. By allowing much bigger container ships and other cargo vessels to easily reach the Eastern United States, it will alter patterns of trade and put pressure on East and Gulf Coast ports like Savannah, Ga., and New Orleans to deepen harbors and expand cargo-handling facilities.

Right now, with its two lanes of locks that can handle ships up to 965 feet long and 106 feet wide — a size known as Panamax — the canal operates at or near its capacity of about 35 ships a day. During much of the year, that can mean dozens of ships are moored off each coast, waiting a day or longer to enter the canal.


The new third set of locks will help eliminate some of those backlogs, by adding perhaps 15 passages to the daily total. More important, the locks will be able to handle “New Panamax” ships — 25 percent longer, 50 percent wider and, with a deeper draft as well, able to carry two or three times the cargo.


No one can predict the full impact of the expansion. But for starters, it should mean faster and cheaper shipping of some goods between the United States and Asia.


Dean Campbell, a soybean farmer from Coulterville, Ill., for instance, expects the expansion will help him compete with farmers in South America — which, he said, “has much poorer infrastructure for getting the grain out.”

The canal expansion “will have a definite impact on us,” Mr. Campbell said. “We think in general it will be a good thing, we just don’t know how good.”


Jean Paul Rodrigue, a professor of global studies and geography at Hofstra University who has studied the expansion project, said that the shipping industry was waiting to see how big the impact would be. “They know it’s going to change things, but they’re not sure of the scale.”

For now the hole, parallel to the existing smaller Pacific locks and about a half-mile away, is a scene of frenetic activity by workers and machines laboring in the tropical haze. At one end, giant hydraulic excavators scoop blasted rock into a parade of earth movers that dump it topside on a slowly growing mountain of rubble. At the other, where the machines have finished their work, a pack of about 50 men buzzes over the rock floor, preparing it to serve as a foundation for a bed of concrete.