Two months ago, the town of Summerville, S.C., broke ground on a $19 million, 307,000-sf shell building (expandable to 923,000 sf) at the Charleston Trade Center, a 750-acre shipping complex with access to the Port of Charleston.
At the same time, the South Carolina Ports Authority has embarked on a $1.6 billion program that includes the construction of a $750 million terminal and $350 rail line at the old North Charleston Naval Base. The Ports Authority is also conducting engineering studies to enable dredging of the port to 52 feet from its current depth of 45 feet. The dredging, at a cost of $509 million, would make Charleston the deepest harbor on the East Coast.
Activity of this kind is occurring up and down the Eastern seaboard and Gulf Coast in anticipation of the opening of the expanded Panama Canal on June 26, the first expansion of the waterway since the canal became operational in 1914. The $5.25 billion construction program added a third set of locks and widened and deepened Gatun Lake, various access channels, and the channel that cuts between Panama’s mountains.
Currently, only ships with cargo no greater than 5,000 TEU (the equivalent of a 20-foot container) can traverse the Panama Canal. The expansion will be able to handle ships up to around 13,000-TEU capacity. The Panama Canal Authority estimates that allowing 12 to 14 larger vessels per day to pass through the new locks would double the canal’s annual activity to 600 million tons of cargo.
Panama Canal traffic flow has been rising in recent years. Last year, a record 340.8 million cargo tons made the 48-mile passage through the channel. The Panama Canal Authority projects that figure to rise to 360 million tons in 2017. But with 56% of the new cargo vessels on order being built to larger-capacity “post-Panamax” standards, expanding the canal became a competitive necessity.
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