Corvallis company hired to expand Panama Canal
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Every time Garry Higdem takes a night flight to Panama on business, he gets a graphic reminder of what he’s there to do.
Coming in over the Pacific side of the isthmus, he looks down on as many as 95 ships waiting to enter the Panama Canal, all lit up like a stray string of Christmas lights floating out to sea.
“When you see the ships queued up to go through the canal, you know why this project is needed,” said Higdem, a group president for CH2M Hill. “It’s quite an impressive sight. ... And you know it’s the same on the Atlantic side.”
When it was completed by American engineers in 1914, the Panama Canal was one of the most ambitious construction projects in human history, spanning 50 miles of swamp and jungle to link the Atlantic with the Pacific, sparing ships a 12,000-mile detour around the southern tip of South America.
Now the canal is rapidly nearing capacity, and the government of Panama — which assumed control of the canal from the United States on Dec. 31, 1999 — is once again turning to American engineers to lead an almost equally ambitious expansion project.
CH2M Hill, a global design firm founded in Corvallis, has been hired to manage the $5.25 billion job.
A national priority
For 94 years the Panama Canal has joined two oceans, facilitating the flow of goods between the Americas and their trading partners in Europe and Asia. Tankers and container ships up to 106 feet wide and 965 feet long — dubbed Panamax in shipping industry lingo — chug through the canal’s twin channels day and night, their sides clearing the six paired sets of concrete locks with just 2 feet to spare.
The volume of trade has grown so great that the canal is becoming a bottleneck.
Meanwhile, a new post-Panamax class of vessels is plying the waves and bypassing the Panama Canal. These oceangoing behemoths, far too big to squeeze through Panama’s locks, drop off Chinese, Japanese and Korean products at West Coast ports for transshipment by truck or rail to the Eastern Seaboard and the Gulf Coast. Or they may go the longer way around, heading west through the larger Suez Canal and depositing their loads directly in East Coast and Gulf ports.
This competition from the U.S. intermodal shipping network and the Suez Canal represents a large and growing threat to Panama’s economic future, making expansion an urgent national priority.
“The canal represents for Panama about 6 percent of GDP,” said Jorge Quijano, the executive vice president overseeing the expansion project for the Panama Canal Authority. “For us, if the canal does well, you can feel its effect in the overall economy of Panama.”
By adding a third shipping lane that can accommodate even the most titanic post-Panamax vessels, the expansion is expected to double the canal’s cargo-carrying capacity.
Pulling it all together
To win the contract to lead the work, Denver-based CH2M Hill had to beat out a pair of industry heavyweights: URS of San Francisco, the nation’s largest design firm, and Parsons Brinckerhoff, the New York City company behind Boston’s mammoth Big Dig.
“In the end, it was a mixture of both the quality of the services they would provide but also the price” that gave the nod to CH2M Hill, Quijano said. “The ability to move in very quickly, that was another consideration.”
Coming in over the Pacific side of the isthmus, he looks down on as many as 95 ships waiting to enter the Panama Canal, all lit up like a stray string of Christmas lights floating out to sea.
“When you see the ships queued up to go through the canal, you know why this project is needed,” said Higdem, a group president for CH2M Hill. “It’s quite an impressive sight. ... And you know it’s the same on the Atlantic side.”
When it was completed by American engineers in 1914, the Panama Canal was one of the most ambitious construction projects in human history, spanning 50 miles of swamp and jungle to link the Atlantic with the Pacific, sparing ships a 12,000-mile detour around the southern tip of South America.
Now the canal is rapidly nearing capacity, and the government of Panama — which assumed control of the canal from the United States on Dec. 31, 1999 — is once again turning to American engineers to lead an almost equally ambitious expansion project.
CH2M Hill, a global design firm founded in Corvallis, has been hired to manage the $5.25 billion job.
A national priority
For 94 years the Panama Canal has joined two oceans, facilitating the flow of goods between the Americas and their trading partners in Europe and Asia. Tankers and container ships up to 106 feet wide and 965 feet long — dubbed Panamax in shipping industry lingo — chug through the canal’s twin channels day and night, their sides clearing the six paired sets of concrete locks with just 2 feet to spare.
The volume of trade has grown so great that the canal is becoming a bottleneck.
Meanwhile, a new post-Panamax class of vessels is plying the waves and bypassing the Panama Canal. These oceangoing behemoths, far too big to squeeze through Panama’s locks, drop off Chinese, Japanese and Korean products at West Coast ports for transshipment by truck or rail to the Eastern Seaboard and the Gulf Coast. Or they may go the longer way around, heading west through the larger Suez Canal and depositing their loads directly in East Coast and Gulf ports.
This competition from the U.S. intermodal shipping network and the Suez Canal represents a large and growing threat to Panama’s economic future, making expansion an urgent national priority.
“The canal represents for Panama about 6 percent of GDP,” said Jorge Quijano, the executive vice president overseeing the expansion project for the Panama Canal Authority. “For us, if the canal does well, you can feel its effect in the overall economy of Panama.”
By adding a third shipping lane that can accommodate even the most titanic post-Panamax vessels, the expansion is expected to double the canal’s cargo-carrying capacity.
Pulling it all together
To win the contract to lead the work, Denver-based CH2M Hill had to beat out a pair of industry heavyweights: URS of San Francisco, the nation’s largest design firm, and Parsons Brinckerhoff, the New York City company behind Boston’s mammoth Big Dig.
“In the end, it was a mixture of both the quality of the services they would provide but also the price” that gave the nod to CH2M Hill, Quijano said. “The ability to move in very quickly, that was another consideration.”
