From Sea to Sea in the Panama Canal

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Created on Friday, 03 August 2007 20:00

From Sea to Sea in the Panama Canal

It's just after dawn on a hot, humid October morning on the outskirts of Panama City on the southern tip of North America. We step from a small pilot boat onto a gangway three floors high. Three Panama Canal pilots and our ABC crew clamber up the steep steps to deck of the container ship Feihe, where we are signed in and welcomed aboard.

Even the tallest person would feel dwarfed in these surroundings. The giant ship is laden with more than 4,200 shipping containers. They are lashed five-high on the deck and another five-high stack of containers is deep below deck.

There are another seven flights of stairs up to the ship's bridge.

Eduardo Caneanedo is the senior canal pilot in the group.

"I got the best job in the world," says Caneanedo with pride. "It is very demanding, but you get a lot of satisfaction once you finish, and you get to meet people [from] all around the world." Then he motions to the spectacular scenery below: "This is my office, so I can't complain."

Caneanedo takes control of the ship from Capt. Yan Zhen Ping and guides it toward the first set of locks. The Feihe left Shanghai 22 days ago. It is on its way to Charleston, S.C., New York and Boston. Fifty-six days after it departed, it will return to its home port and load up for another two-month journey.

As the Feihe approaches the Miraflores locks, giant tug boats push and nudge its massive hull. The Feihe belongs to a class of freighters called Panamax. The six sets of locks on the 92-year-old canal are 110 feet wide. Panamax ships are designed to maximize every inch: They are up to 106 feet wide. It is like passing a massive piece of thread through a needle that is only a fraction larger.

As the Feihe's bow enters the first lock, cables are thrown on board. They are attached to powerful locomotives that ride a cog railway along the canal's edge. Eight locomotives -- two in each corner -- gingerly prod and pull at the ship's hull, making sure it does not get damaged and it does not damage the vital locks.

As soon as the Feihe leaves the locks, another ship will enter. It is like this 24 hours a day, every day of the year.

The Feihe's owners have paid the Panama Canal Authority more than $200,000 so that their ship can pass through without delay and stay on its tight delivery schedule. It sounds like a lot for a passage that will take less than a day, but as U.S. Ambassador to Panama William Eaton likes to say, "the canal is the world's greatest shortcut." It cuts days off sea travel and saves manufacturers, shippers and consumers millions of dollars.

"I look at it and I think it's one of the engineering marvels of the world," says Ambassador Eaton, "when you look at this canal and how massive it is, and you think about the ingenuity and the brilliance of those American engineers and those workers from like 90 countries in the world who came here to build this wonderful canal, it really fills me with awe."

Across the massive length of the Feihe in letters perhaps 20-feet tall is the word "COSCO." No, it is not a spelling error: The company has no relation to the discount retailer Costco (although it could be transporting some of its products). The Feihe is one of the more than 600 ships operated by the Chinese Ocean Shipping Company, owned by the government of the Peoples Republic of China.

Today, the Panama Canal is all about China.

Forty percent of the world's container traffic travels through the canal. Just three years ago, the number was 33.8 percent. Exports from China to the U.S. East Coast count for virtually all of the increase.

I ask the Feihe's captain what's inside the containers he's transporting halfway around the world. He tells me he does not know. He is simply in charge of getting them to their destination. It's a safe bet that they contain the Chinese consumer goods that are now everywhere in the U.S. market: Perhaps refrigerators or flat-panel televisions or blue jeans or bicycles.

In 1999, the U.S. government ceded control of the canal to the people of Panama amid predictions that it would fall apart. Instead, it is busy, safer and more profitable than ever.

For Panamanians, the canal is a source of pride, tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of million of dollars in revenue for the government -- which is why Sunday Panamanians approved a referendum that authorizes an expansion of the canal that will cost almost $6 billion.

The expansion will add new access channels and a third set of locks that are 180 feet wide -- wide enough to handle most of the new mega ships that travel the seas today. If construction goes according to plan, the canal expansion will be finished by 2014 -- the 100th anniversary of the opening of the original canal.

As the Feihe sails out of the Pedro Miguel Locks, the third and final set of locks on the Pacific side of the canal, it eases forward into the long, winding canal carved from the jungle a century ago by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. These waters sit almost 80 feet above sea level. Almost 50 miles across the Panamanian isthmus, the Feihe will enter the Gatun locks. And sometime late in the evening, it will enter the waters of the Atlantic and steam towards Charleston, S.C., its first port of call.

As the Feihe leaves, more ships line up to enter the monumental canal that helped reshape the world in the 20th century. Now, that canal is itself about to be reshaped to that it can remain relevant in the 21st century.

Written By: Jeffrey Kofman
Source: ABC News
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