Why the Panama Canal is Dying

“The war in the Middle East will eventually end.” That’s what I love about this channel: it’s boundless optimism.

I never connected the idea that raising those water gates would have a fresh water cost. Crazy that theyre just dumping drinking water by the millions of gallons for every single ship that goes through.

Interesting that the Mexican canal proposal also includes industrial parks along the route. Instantly sounds like "set up your new vehicle assembly plant here" to me, which is a pretty genius position to take, especially compared to the other alternatives proposed.

I’m Panamanian and I got to tell you, they did teach me about the canal when I was in middle school, matter of facts I went on a school trip to the canal and I got to tell you first 9 min of this video I learn more about the canal than I did all 14 years I lived there, all I knew about it was how the boats pass through it.

As a Panamanian, the government is planning to dam other rivers to supply water to the canal. We have a lot of water, it's just not distributed efficiently.

My information is that the original engineers that planned the old Panama Canal, built reservoirs for the full locks to pump their water to when then wanted to lower a ship. The new "SmartAss" Panamax Canal builders neglected to build the reservoirs and chose to flush the receding locks into the ocean. Now they are scrambling to build the additional reservoirs.

Not to mention that traveling around Cape Horn takes you through some of the most turbulent ocean on the planet.

This february in Los Angeles, it was one of the wettest ever recorded. I live in the deserts of Southern California, and we received two and a half times our normal february rainfall. And it's not done raining.

Quick correction… As someone who has actually been through the Panama Canal… The water is not pumped. There are not any pumps involved, unless there are pumps in the new section. The original locks use gravity only. I do not know if that is the case for the new locks, but I would imagine so.

The panama canal could be re-built to double the number of ships passing through using the same amount of water. Currently, the locks can only be run in one direction at a time so when ships are going up, the level of the locks are changed with no ship in the lock when the level is lowered. If the locks were separated by a small lake, big enough for two ships to pass they could run ships in both directions simultaneously so that the locks never changed level without a ship in the lock, doubling the throughput without using any more water. BTW, the reason they are limiting the cargo on the ships has nothing to do with the amount of water used, the same amount of water is used to change the level of the locks when a fully loaded ship is in the locks, or completely empty. The reason for reducing the cargo is to prevent the ships from running aground. The lower level of the lake means the channel is shallower, and the ships must have a shallower draft.

It's interesting that you have overlooked the Panama Railway which has been operational for decades carrying containers between the two ports of the canal. Expansion and upgrade could also increase the carrying capacity of the "fifth" alternative.

I can "fix" the Panama Canal. Proposal 1 One of the earliest plans for the canal was a sea level crossing. The expense of that plan got it rejected, and the existing canal was the winning proposal. The costs of digging out the sea level crossing have fallen, and that plan could be revisited. Proposal 2 Each crossing "costs" 52,000,000 gallons of water. Stop it. No seriously, stop it. Two options for ending the use of water: 1 don't let gravity do the work. Use pumps to pump the 52,000,000 gallons up from the lower level to the upper level (except maybe the top level, to reduce the salt contamination in the lake). 2 have a pool next to the lock. Don't drain the water from above, or pump from below, but use a water pool per lock for the water source, and the pumping "costs" are reduced and the water source is maintained local to the lock. This eliminates contamination, and reduces water use for minimal extra power. Proposal 2 option 2 is the most practical, as it uses 100% of the existing canal, but with enhancements to limit water loss. Proposal 1 is the most sustainable, with zero additional power use, and, all being sea level makes the maintenance easier, but would take the equivalent work of making an all new canal, just within the space of the current one. I would do #2(2) to stabilize it now, and begin work on #1 for a more permanent solution. But nobody asked me. Unfortunately, I expect Panama will run the existing canal without improvements until dead, then wait for some other country to swoop in with trillions of dollars to fix it for them. For doing nothing is always the easiest option. It just usually results in failure.

Fun fact, Costa Rica had a trans-oceanic railway network connecting the Pacific with the Atlantic via trains, but it was discontinued in the 90´s for "financial" reasons and now the train only runs in the central valley area where 60% of Costa Rica´s population lives, leaving the rest of the line in disrepair. To be honest, its shocking that the government is not seriously proposing fixing the rail line as a possible proyect, specially with the current events :(

Worth mentioning that the canal is useful and can save millions of $ (and many, many lives of crew members) because Cape Horn is the most dangerous and vioent stretch of ocean on the planet. Many ships that go through there face unreal waves (sometimes surpassing 15-20 meters of height) that travel very fast and are incredibly steep that badly damage the ships and their cargo if they are container carriers, without mentioning the enormous weight that the ice adds to them, as water is sprayed by the waves and immediately frozen all throughout the ships, making them very unstable and prone to sinking. The clash of the currents from the Southern Ocean with the South Atlantic combined with the immensely powerful winds create some of the most unique and destructive waves on the planet. Once you go in, you can't turn around, you simply have to proceed. The weather can go from extremely bad and dangerous to straight up deadly in a matter of minutes with no warnings. The horrific stories that many seafarers have to tell about that passage are heart wrenching to say the least, many of them thought they wouldn't make it out alive because the conditions were just SO bad. So yeah, it is a very dangerous place to go through, you really do NOT want to go through that passage unless you absolutely have to.

Everything on this channel keep blowing my mind.

If the goal is to get shipping containers from coast to coast, why would you build roads for trucks instead of rails for trains? Each truck can only move 1 or two containers where the trains can move hundreds. Trucks are for distribution from arteries not the arteries of travel themselves. Plus, since there would be very few stops for the train, it would be one of the best candidates for high speed rail.

Not to mention Cape Horn is one of the most dangerous passages that exists

In my opinion the easiest thing to do is just to build reservoirs along the locks. This is what the (admittedly smaller) locks on the Rhein-Main-Donau Kanal in Germany do. Since they don't have much water entering the canal at its highest point when a ship wants to go down through a lock they simply pump all the water into a concrete tank. When a ship wants to go back up they pump the water back up into the lock. It uses basically zero water and solves the problem.

Great video. This has has always been one of the flagship YouTube channels in my opinion. I heard about this Panama Canal problem, and I was aware that there was an environmental factor, and this video does a good job of explaining it.

As an engineer, I would propose that the water from the final lock be pumped back up to the lake, rather than dumped into the ocean. Can pumps be built with that capacity? Can Panama afford the cost of it?