Can Panama canal is dying? why battle against nature

Introduction

The world’s biggest traffic jam has started. More than 150 cargo ships are standing in the sea waiting for their cargo to pass through the Panama Canal. Maximum is also ready to give 400,000 dollars to the government to pass through the canal, but still the authority is not giving them permission to pass through the Panama canal. In the Panama canal Neither any maintenance work is going on and the channel of the canal is closed for any reason, but the engineering marvel Panama Canal, which caught the attention of the whole world, is going through a huge crisis and this battle is with none other than nature. It is against, but how?

Basic about Panama canal

Viewers there is two shortcuts for the ships around the world. One is the Suez Canal built in Egypt, which is used to connect East Asian countries such as China, Japan, Taiwan and Singapore to Europe. If the ships want to go to East America or East Canada, another shortcut is used and that is the Panama Canal. Built at the point of Central America. There are about 50 thousand cargo ships in the world and 70 percent of them are used these two shortcuts. if for any reason there is a problem in these two shortcuts, Suez and the Panama canal, it will have an effect on the whole world, even if we don’t want to, which the world has already seen a glimpse of when in 2021. The Ever-Gone Ship blocked the entire Suez Canal traffic for six days. If something like this happens in the future, the ships will have to go around all the way, which will take more time and the fuel cost will also be extra. For the use of those two shortcuts, shipping companies have to pay heavy toll tax to the canal authorities and also have to bear their burdens.

why we need Panama canals ?

For example, A ship from the United Kingdom has to go to San Francisco in West America. Now the ship has two ways to reach its destination, either it goes through the entire North Atlantic Ocean and crosses the bottom of Cape Horn in South America to the Pacific Ocean. The total distance is more than 25,000 km, in which the ship will have to spend 28 days and about 8 million liters of fuel.
In this entire trip, the shipping company will not only waste time but will also spend 32 million dollars in fuel cost, which is 260 crore rupees. Using the direct Pacific Ocean and then San Francisco. In the first route, where a distance of 25,000 kilometers had to be traveled, by using the Panama Canal, this distance has been reduced to only 14,000 kilometers, that is, 44 percent less than the first route, due to the Panama Canal. About half of the fuel cost is saved, which is 14 million dollars. Now you may think that the ships save more by going through the Panama Canal, then they prefer to go through here, but this is not the case today. The toll tax of a ship passing through is around 400,000 dollars. But sometimes this rate goes up to eight to ten million dollars. And even then ships are happy to pay this amount.

Advantages of Panama canal

The biggest advantage of using canals is the time saving. if the ships will add 15 or 20 days extra on each route, it mean that a ship that plies a road 24 times in year, it will run only 12 times and thus they will have 50 percent less bookings. In simple words, time is money and to save the same time, the shipping companies would pass through the Panama Canal by paying the asking price. So whether they have to stand in line for five or 10 days or why they don’t have to raise the concerns of the canal authorities, but the problem now is that even if the Panama authorities want to, they cannot allow more ships to pass through the Panama canal. Is this a problem? Before knowing this, we need to understand how Panama Canal works.

How Panama canal work

Whoever designed this engineering masterpiece was indeed a genius, but not so much that he could have defied nature. There is an ocean. A canal like Switzerland could not be dug here because the land here is at a height of 30 meters above the sea level, so the ships are first lifted up to 30 meters to the level of Lake Kenton and then back to the other coast. It is lowered into the sea. We are talking about cargo ships that weigh millions of tons. Locks are installed on the canal openings to lift such heavy ships up to 30 meters. These locks are like stairs to lift the shift. First, the door of lock number one opens and the ship goes into it, By closing the door of lock number one, the water from lock number two is filled into lock number one. In this process, no motor or pump is required as the water level in lock number two is high which is automatically locked by gravity. As soon as the water level in both the locks is at the water level, the ship now moves into lock number two and the door of lock number two is closed from behind, similarly water from lock number three is now filled into lock number two. After the water level in both the locks is equal, the seed door is opened and finally the ship reaches lock number three. As the water level becomes equal to the Kenton Lake, the ship now enters the Kenton Lake by opening the last door.
In this process of 10 to 15 minutes, the ship is lifted up 30 meters. After traveling in Kenton Lake, it takes 11 hours for the ship to reach the second course of Panama canal and there are also sea locks that bring the ship back down 30 meters. The thing to be noted here is that in both the processes i.e. raising or lowering the ship, water from Lake Kenton is used. Equally, it is the fresh water of the lake which is actually thrown into the sea and wasted, but the water is used to operate the locks of the Panama Canal as well as for the drinking purposes of the local population using the Panama Canal. Just one ship leak wastes as much ketone water as 500,000 people drink every day.

Conclusion

Now various proposals are being given to solve this problem, in which oceanic corridors will be built, ships will first unload containers on one coast, then those containers will be loaded on trucks or trains and transported to the other coast and then From there reloading in other ships. That is a good option, but in the western parts of South America, the Antis mountain range stands as a wall. It is spread over 9000 km. It is the longest mountain range in the world. Laying road network is not possible.

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