|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
By: Edward Graham Sebbie
Effective Wednesday, the Panama Canal Authority restored a tenth daily transit for the big Neopanamax ships that carry most of the world’s containers and gas. Total traffic across both sets of locks now moves from 32 to 33 ships daily, also allowing ships to sit a foot deeper in the water at 49 feet instead of 48.
This sounds minor in shipping but necessary because for more than two years, the canal has been living on a ration owing to brutal El Nino drought which drained Gatun Lake, the canal’s heart. At its worst, daily transits were cut to just 22 stretching waiting times past three weeks. Some desperate shippers had to pay as much as $4 million at auction just to jump the queue.
Last month, 98 percent of all big-ship slots were still booked solid and even with one more slot, the old normal of 36 to 38 transits a day is still far off.
The Port of Los Angeles just had its busiest September ever, with more than a million containers because a lot of cargo that would have gone through Panama to the U.S. East Coast is now getting dumped in California and sent east by rail. Grain shippers from the U.S. Gulf to Japan are still paying 36 percent more than last year.
The Authority is giving most of the new space to container ships and LPG carriers, with little left for bulk grain ships. It has also poured billions into water-saving basins and wants to build a whole new reservoir on the Rio Indio River to future.
Cruise season opened on October 7th with the Carnival Miracle, the first of more than 220 cruise ships expected through May.
Thpugh the canal is easing, in a world that relies on it for six percent of all sea trade, one extra slot is less a celebration and more a reminder of how fragile that shortcut has become.
