New Panama Canal lock gates moved to chambers

The first gates of the Panama Canal expansion program have been moved to the new locks complex on the Atlantic side, marking another milestone in the $5.25 billion project.

“This is a very important operation because it involved the first movement of the gates from the special dock where they were unloaded to the lower chamber of the new locks,” said Jorge L. Quijano, administrator of the Panama Canal Authority, in a press release.

Quijano said the process included moving the more than 3,000-ton steel structures to the dry lock chambers using a pavement ramp built for that purpose.

Eight of the 16 rolling gates that will be used for the new locks are already in Panama. The first shipment of four rolling gates arrived in August 2013, and the second shipment with the other four rolling gates was delivered last month. The remaining eight gates will arrive in two separate shipments from its manufacturing site in Italy. The third shipment is scheduled to arrive this October, and all gates are expected to be on site in Panama in February 2015.

In the next couple of days, the other gates already in Panama will be moved from the temporary unloading dock to the dry lock chambers to be able to use the area for the arrival of the remaining lock gates.

The expansion project is now 77 percent complete, according to the canal authority. The deadline for completing the expansion has already been delayed multiple times, with the original target date of October 2014 set back by more than a year to January 2016.

Earlier this year, work was suspended by Grupo Unido por el Canal - the consortium building the locks, which consists of Sacyr Vallehermoso of Spain, Impregilo of Italy, Jan De Nul of Luxembourg and Constructora Urbana of Panama - when discussions over who should pay for the $1.6 billion in cost overruns broke down. Both GUPC and the Panama Canal Authority agreed to pay $100 million each, and work began again, but that two-week stoppage resulted in a three-month delay in the expansion.

Source: Journal of Commerce