Nouvelles écluses et second souffle pour le canal de Panama

Abstract

Opened in 1914, the Panama Canal was equipped then with locks designed to accommodate the large warships of the time. Caught in their straitjacket, the canal showed its technical inadequacies for large commercial vessels from the 1970s onwards. This led to a levelling off of its traffic and to a reorientation of some flows, particularly in the container industry. To boost traffic, the Panamanian authorities began recalibrating the canal in the early 2010s, including equipping it with new, much larger locks. Since they entered into service in 2016, canal traffic has increased significantly, but with different growth rates for different traffic segments. Oil and gas traffic has grown the most, while container traffic has increased less than was generally expected. The article focuses on these locks, both old and new, to which the panamax and newpanamax gauges correspond. A detailed analysis of recent trends in canal traffic forms its central part. The old and new locks handle different types of traffic, depending on the size of the ships and on the nature of the traffic. This Panama-centred analysis is complemented by a diachronic study of the geography of North American container traffic, which partly reflects the vicissitudes of the canal’s contemporary history.

Keywords

• Panama canal
• Recalibration
• Locks
• Containers
• US ports